Margins
by felix-hortensio
Summary: Luna and Snape, unromantically. Though it's mostly about Luna's dad. Also featuring Astronomy, Ravenclaws, freedom of speech, and a drain. Incoherent. Read it.
1. chapter one

**Margins**

* * *

Rating: Nothing scary just yet. 

Disclaimer: Yes, yes, I disclaim.

Notes: Chapters will be added, but they will probably be added in both directions-- that is, preceding and following the gimmick below. This is not because I'm pretentious: it's because I'm incompetent. Or, rather, not competent enough to write an entire story sequentially.

Criticism: may it be incisive.

* * *

Luna's Potions partner was one Adrian Ashmole, whose main goal in life was to fit the universe into a filing cabinet. A Ravenclaw, naturally. His childhood had been spent reinventing matrix algebra in his mother's office at the University of Makapansgat (where she taught Elementals), as Nora and Charles Ashmole, professors, did not believe in formal schooling. Their policy was that their children would figure things out on their own-- a policy to which little Adrian had committed himself in a startlingly thorough way. He rearranged the office according to the phosphorescence of the things in it at age four. He rearranged it according to the optimal thaumogravitational relations between various objects in it at age six. He rearranged it again-- with his mother's desk perforce upside-down on the ceiling-- according to a series of complex algorithms performed on their sulfuric content; this time at the age of ten.

His older sister Julia, meanwhile, was writing a dissertation on Skriggets, a small lifeform whose properties were precisely midway between those of a virus, a fungus, and an anaerobic bacterium-- so he didn't lack for good company.

The Ashmoles had analysed the letter Hogwarts sent Adrian on his eleventh birthday for everything but semantic content. Nora had been pleased to discover that Minerva McGonagall's ink was a perfectly balanced mixture of sulfur, mercury, and salt, and wrote to congratulate her. Charles had worked out what kinds of tree and papyrus had been used to make the paper, and joyously deduced that a new species of reed was waiting to be discovered; while tracking it down several months later he also found out that Bovitz' Ragpaper Co. was breaking several magical fair-trade agreements and forced its manager to resign. Julia noted a small footprint trail (running from just above the date to the bottom left of the page) which matched the trails of a rare Skrigget species, proving that they could survive even in as harsh a magical environment as Hogwarts. And Adrian simply ignored it, as he was too busy with a fingerprint database from the Twenties.

Minerva McGonagall, being no fool, alerted Dumbledore about Nora's letter at once.

"Third-generation professors, Albus. Both of them. Honestly, they should have been forbidden from breeding-- I'm surprised the boy has not yet been killed in an experiment or left to starve on philosophical grounds."

Dubledore's eyes had twinkled.

"Their older one turned out as well as could be expected, however."

"But the regulations are different now," objected McGonagall. "And rightly so. These are dangerous times; I certainly don't trust the Ashmoles to teach their children Defense."

Julia had been exempted from attendance at Hogwarts due to a peculiar statute dating back to 1299, since struck down, which stipulated that Wizards and Witches could substitute five years of vocational apprenticeship for formal schooling if they passed the requisite exams at the end. The statute had been formulated by the Headmaster of Beauxbatons in response to the Inquisition's sly ploy of employing Wizarding types as familiars, which had made travel almost impossible for Wizards in much of southern France.

"They're good people, Minerva; they're just a bit out of touch with reality."

"Which is why it is absolutely imperative that we put them in touch with reality as quickly as possible," McGonagall had decided, lips set in the most uncompromising of lines. She had arrived at the Ashmoles' residence that very evening. The conversation had gone rather well, though the Professors Ashmole had taken issue with the curriculum, the concept of dormitories, and the tartan McGonagall wore.

"The dye is unstable," Nora had insisted, and suggested several alternatives with a flick of her wand.

McGonagall had stayed calm. After many digressions the Ashmoles agreed to entrust Adrian to her keeping. After several more digressions the concept of school supplies-- objects with physical existence which were to be bought first and only then analysed-- was communicated to them. Charles had expressed astonishment at the textbook monopoly of Flourish & Blotts: in his opinion the booksellers _Lux etc. ex Libris et alia_ were of much higher calibre. The objections were all answered, in the end, and McGonagall swished out of there with written promises (in properly mixed ink) that Adrian would be on the Hogwarts Express on the requisite day.

They kept their promises. When the booklist came out Charles almost renounced the enterprise, having nought but contempt for all but one of the texts on it. Fortunately it was a text he did not have, and _L&eLea_ were out of stock. Julia took it upon herself to supply her little brother with a trunk that would be impervious to Skriggets, which thoughtfulness provoked a burst of enthusiasm in the rest of the family: it had to be brought into balance; its materials would form a systematic guide to the various accidents matter can have. They worked on it for three days and nights, by the end of which it was perfect enough to make even the trip to Diagon Alley tolerable.

It was at Flourish & Blotts that things fell apart.

Within thirty-three seconds of walking in, Adrian had climbed a shelf and begun rearranging the books. This had provoked giggles from bystanders, which had provoked more bystanders and more giggles, as well as some good-humoured spells from the onlookers that reversed whatever Adrian did. He was told to descend at once by Ath de St. Victor, clerk, who was personally invested in the shelving system as is. Adrian's parents had been called over, but they wandered off almost at once, not seeing the problem and having found books in the back room with false information that they immediately had to correct. Adrian was finally forced from the shelf by a sequence of charms, which left him in a full-body bind until the arrival of a minion of the Ministry who escorted him and his parents out of the store.

The Ministry insisted that the Ashmoles send Adrian to the Spivak Centre for Oddly-Functioning Children for, as they called it, recalibration.

"He will have to interact with other children, Nora!" said Mrs. Lowy, the ministerial underling, who had met Mrs. Ashmole at a museum. "He will be going to school! You've certainly done a good job with him, and no one disputes it. But it will be so difficult for him... so difficult to adjust!"

McGonagall was furious for not having foreseen something like this, but she only arrived after Adrian had been taken to Spivak's. They were in the process of administering a variety of tests to the poor boy, which he did not wish to take but to take apart. This could not be explained to the researchers. They were following proper procedure. It was important that they figure out what was wrong with the boy. It was, in fact, a matter of Ministerial urgency. His parents had already sent owls to every person of note at their university as well as several personae with a solid knowledge of law, but it was only the following day that the combined forces of McGonagall, the Law Faculty, and the Ashmoles succeeded in having Adrian released.

The test results made the researchers smug. The uncontestable fact had emerged that Adrian Ashmole was, surprisingly, almost a Squib. His talents were of an orderly, taxonomic, even mathematical nature, but so low in their magical content that the thaumometers barely rose past zero in all parts of his thought. His mother, quite simply, had always supplied whatever magical hefting needed to be done; and his father had provided the information. Adrian organized it. He could barely produce a glow from the tip of his wand after seventeen hours of training.

Counterintuitively, the Ashmoles were pleased: did this mean they could keep their child at home?

But decrees were decrees, and McGonagall assured them that Adrian would not be forced beyond his abilities, and that all help that could be given him would be. It was, however, pure chance that he ended up sitting with Luna Lovegood on the train. The two made an animated three-dimensional model of the contents of that week's Quibbler, according to various (changing) criteria that they made up as they went along. The rest of the seats in their compartment remained empty throughout the trip.

* * *

(c) 2005 by felix hortensio. 


	2. chapter two

Yes, there is discontinuity between the previous chapter and this one. Do not write in to tell me so. The fossil record might be pretty complete, but it tends to be discovered in fits and jumps. _Patience_. The holes will be filled.

Also, I don't want to hear anything about aubergines.

* * *

Snape was unfond of the Lovegood child. As a general rule he respected creatures that didn't blink, as most of them were small supply-cabinets in and of themselves, but most of them did not know English. The Lovegood child did. This was unfortunate. 

Her knowledge of English was selective enough to make him want to _Accio _a fifth of Ogden's every time she opened her mouth.

On her first day in his class her hand had gone up as soon as he'd turned to glare them all into silence. He'd idly wondered how long she could keep her arm in the air before it started to twitch, then proceeded to test his hypothesis (three minutes) by ignoring her. She ignored his ignoring her. After seven and a half minutes, during which he enumerated rules, procedures, and consequences, she had neither blinked nor moved. After eight minutes _he _started to twitch. After nine it was all he could do to keep himself from drawing his wand, casting _Silencio _on her, and only then inviting her to speak.

"Was something unclear, Miss--?"

"I was wondering, Sir, are you part goblin?"

There had been giggles, which had ceased as soon as he'd scowled at their source.

"Have you a name?" he'd replied in a dangerously neutral tone.

"I'm Luna Lovegood," she'd said. (Snape had felt his lip curl like leaf in the fire.) "I was asking, Sir, because your--"

"Enough," he'd hissed. "This class is not an article in the _Quibbler_; and you, Miss Lovegood, will in future confine your questions to subjects that pertain to the study of Potions. Do I make myself clear?"

This had gotten her attention.

"No, Sir."

Most of the front row had begun to flutter as if in a breeze. To their credit, none of them had dared turn to look at the back row and the girl in it-- a happy surprise, as he would otherwise have permanently set their necks in a wrung position.

"Excuse me?"

"I don't understand what you mean about the _Quibbler_, Sir."

"Ten points from Ravenclaw," he'd explained, turning a shade of aubergine. "And I strongly suggest you stop wasting the class's time with your impertinent nonsense."

Luna had given him the benefit of the doubt, in the form of a toothy grin. "The _Quibbler'_s a very nice magazine," she'd mused as if to herself. "And it has the Three-Cornered Cauldron every Friday-- do you know it, Professor Snape?"

The Three-Cornered Cauldron was a supplement in which all manner of charlatan, Muggle, and lunatic could publish their favourite cure for boils & feminine pains, etc. Needless to say, Friday and Saturday were the busiest days in the Poison Control Centre at St. Mungo's.

"Twenty five, Miss Lovegood, and if you open your mouth again it will be fifty."

She'd stared at him with slightly glazed eyes.

"My father says--"

"It does not matter," he'd finally snapped, "what your fiction-writing father says on this or any other subject. If you wish to pass this class you will pay especially close attention to what I say. Now BE QUIET!"

He'd given her a detention for good measure. The points had deducted themselves automatically.

Luna's Housemates had been chill to her for a short time thereafter, but as it was the official policy of Ravenclaw House to treat the winning and losing of points as an exercise in applied Arithmancy, such losses were quickly forgiven-- in her case, by the end of lunch. The calculation of expected wins and losses was an elaborate ritual conducted every night in the common room, with bets taken and prizes given out for the best predictive algorithms, all with Professor Flitwick squeaking his enthusiasm in the background. For the more dedicated folk it had become the equivalent of an extra class.

Snape found the self-absorption of Ravenclaws mildly amusing.

"Do you call this an essay, Beckett?" he'd inquire. "The snakestone was valued by Athanasius Kircher as a validation of his alchemical integral 25 f-parentheses-Rose-parentheses multiplied by... is that _my _name you're multiplying? How odd. I would not have thought I deserve a place in this Jesuit fantasy."

Beckett would try to explain.

"I assume the points you are about to lose have been factored into this drivel?" he'd reply sleekly.

Beckett would point to a scribble towards the bottom of the page. They had gall, the narrowminded fools.

"Well? How many am I going to take?"

A former student named Bartholomew "Cabbage" Kabalski, after months of insomnia, had discovered the Law that bore his name: the average weekly points lost in altercations with Snape will be equal to the number of points Isaacs and Sverdloff will gain in Astronomy.

And there was the rub. As neither Isaacs nor Sverdloff showed any signs of finishing school, the approximation had held good for a number of years. Yet since Rose Vizvary and Tim Douglas were still around too, and since Garvan Little had been erratic since his mid-OWL breakdown, and since Nguyen Phu had withdrawn into Herbology to the exclusion of everything else, and since Snape had discovered sins in Maudie Matilda...

The problem with Luna was clear to anyone with a brain-- however many glitches said brain had.

There was much excitement, much of it joyous, when Jeremy Beckett had tapped his pumpkin juice glass and announced the end of the Cabbage Monopoly. The equations would have to be redone. The ceremonies would begin at precisely eighteen hundred hours. All were required to be there-- and encouraged to steal food, as there was no guarantee when the communal labours would end. And could we have a toast for our paradigm shifter Miss Lovegood?

Luna had clapped so enthusiastically that one of the bumblebee bats hanging off her earlobes had come detached and landed, flapping and displeased, in an unfinished cup of soup.

Since the most pressing issue was to come up with a workable solution for the immediate future, the _Summa Punctillicae _-- a product of the great Cebus Johanson's excruciating imagination back in the late 1930s-- was detached from the Ravenclaw hourglass and taken to the common room. To prevent any change in point totals while the data was being analysed, the portrait (a Sevillean monk) was instructed to keep everyone in (to which request he smirked a little and went back to reading).

"I'm getting a severe case of Ravenclaustrophobia," intoned Cho Chang to a friend.

"Tell me about it," the friend had rolled her eyes. "Seriously, I should have been in Gryff... God, I don't really care _where_; this House is a bloody loony bin."

The _Summa Punctillicae _recorded the occasion for each change of points. Reading and extracting the relevant bits took most of the night as two of the correlation circuits had become weak and ineffectual, and because the extracters had a propensity to get distracted.

"Oy, Peters! You lost points for sticking mint _up your nose_ at the _theatre_?"

Fortunately butterbeer appeared at around midnight. Fitch Miller, in a fit of inspiration, spilled his on one of the cylinders, which prompted a reaction very similar to that of the circuits when working. Efforts redoubled. Chocolate was consumed. Chants were chanted. When Luna's expected losses were reduced to a matrix of normal curves, it transpired that all would be well if Elise Weinstein, Pipsa Karjalainen, and Archangelo de Casale each answered one more question per week.

"De Casale?" Flitwick had squeaked. "What makes you think I want to hear another word out of _him_?"

Beckett had explained that everyone else already had their quota filled too; Ravenclaw was sadly cursed-- and blessed, of course-- with a high number of people who barely knew how to talk, or got nervous trying, or were simply too busy being intellectual to actually go to classes--

"And it's cursed with an even higher number of people who don't know how to listen," Flitwick had tried to be stern. "Silly boy; do you think you're _teaching _the class?"

Rose Vizvary had rolled her eyes: she had an enchanted quill; she could pass notes with Archangelo; she would answer instead of him where necessary. "So you might have to get sick of me--"

Professor Flitwick had pointed out that such plots were hardly appropriate for the ears of the Charms Professor.

Archangelo had pointed out that the Charms Professor's ears were not in attendance, having been replaced by those of the Ravenclaw Head of House.

This had provoked an extended bout of laughter from Luna, who immediately transfigured Flitwick's ears into a pair of Muggle headphones. Flitwick would later report that they had been playing Gregorian chants--oddly appropriate, since by that then it was most definitely matins and time for the Invitatory. She won back her fifty points then and there, although the good professor reconsidered his decision when it turned out that Luna was unable to reverse the spell. She was also unable to repeat the accomplishment on any of the eager volunteers who lined up for a go. Yet the mood was optimistic nonetheless, as Jeremy Beckett's Babylonian tables assured them that Miss Lovegood would, with an eighty-three percent probability, be able to contribute an average of ten weekly points in Transfiguration within two months.

"Eighty-three and thirty-six sixtieths, that is," he amended. "Which is marginally better than the chances of running into Filch behind the statue of Korah at any given time on a Sunday."

Flitwick had flooed McGonagall for help with his ears and played deaf when she asked him who had authored this nonsense. And when the matter served itself at the staff table, Snape had fixed Luna with a glare which she insouciantly failed to see.


	3. chapter three

The jellyfish (dis)continues. Should I raise the rating? There's another chapter in the works, about (predictably) Luna's dad.

Blackadder: I did mean Antinoamian with an _a_, for a variety of reasons -- the most banal of which concerns Noam Chomsky. What I forgot to mention, and which has since been fixed, is that the endless gorilla song is in French. Oops. Thanks for drawing my attention to that-- I often fall prey to my pantryful of pepperjack cheese...

* * *

When one gave Luna Lovegood a detention it was best to make sure she served it alone.

This increased the amount of time one was required to supervise one's detainees, but prior attempts to put her in a batch had failed spectacularly. Once she had stared at Alicia Spinnet for upwards of an hour. Another time she had chattered at Ginevra Weasley: the only time Snape had ever felt sorry for a member of that despicable clan.

On this occasion her transgression had been to transfigure her Potions ingredients into an approximation of the potion she was supposed to be making (a rose-and-wine topical poultice for fractures). Under questioning she submitted that she often did this to her ingredients, changing them into their chopped, diced, ground, or otherwise treated form for his benefit as he walked around so as to give herself more time to actually prepare them.

"Did you think you could fool the tester?" he'd hissed.

She did not.

"But I wasn't going to submit it as my final potion, Sir!"

"I see. You were just lying for lying's sake. For practice."

She had continued to gaze at him.

"I suppose I couldn't expect anything more from a Lovegood," Snape had muttered before waving the mixture away: "_Evanesco_, and a detention. And I will have a word with your Head of House about this."

"I don't lie, Sir."

He'd turned around with an expression that could snap bones.

"And what do you call this sorry attempt at dissembly-- the Holy Communion?"

"No," she had replied calmly. "I just wanted to see what the potion would look like so I could know if I was doing it right."

"Perhaps listening to the instructions might have served you better, you imbecilic little know-it-all."

Luna had been unperturbed. "I have trouble with your handwriting, Sir," she'd said, leaving him mystified at the connection between his handwriting and his spoken instructions. Perhaps the Lovegoods lived in a silent comic-book universe with thought-bubbles floating over everyone's heads. It would explain a lot.

She appeared at the scheduled hour, looking vague and humming a rhyme. He closed his eyes against the flood of exasperation that washed over him at every sight of her glassy fishbowl eyes, then ordered her to the sink in the workroom where a number of jars-- their innards coated with residues of varied toxicity-- awaited her ministrations. It was still unclear to him how she had managed to transfigure her ingredients so consistently as to fool him all year. A more devout Seventh-Year could typically accomplish it to some pasty degree, but he set alarm spells over his NEWT classes to prevent that sort of thing. And Minerva's reports on her progress in class were uninspiring: Luna Lovegood never really _did_ anything-- she always did something _else_. That should have warned him, of course, but even he could be a bloody fool.

He cursed himself for being such a bloody fool.

The tower of jars shifted a bit in the sink, prompting her to raise her invisible eyebrows in apprehension. Encouraged, Snape pocketed her wand and omitted to tell her where the gloves were located. It was nothing Madam Pomfrey wouldn't be able to fix.

"Ah-- Miss Lovegood, if I find you have broken anything--"

She stared at the jars for a time, then stepped out of her slippers and slipped her hands into them. Her toes were uncommonly long and curved, the toenails painted with Ugaritic astrological signs-- doubtless on a tip from her father's unbottomed supply of useless misinformation. Snape's nerves tightened again and he turned back to his store cupboards. She'd be unable to wash the jars silently, he reasoned; and he'd set a specific amplification charm to ensure that the shattering of glass could not be covered up by a cough.

Presently a chanson about a gorilla could be heard over the clumsy sounds of the sink. The gorilla's cage had been poorly shut, he learned. The gorilla then lost its hair. Snape's teeth creaked together and he considered casting the Antinoamian Curse on himself in order to unlearn French for the duration of this ordeal. The song, predictably, had about fifty verses, which Luna sometimes felt compelled to repeat. Other than that, however, she acquitted herself tolerably well with the jars, failing only to remove the colony of fungus that had taken over the habitual residence of his stock of prosimian hairballs.

But as luck would have it, she completed her task exactlynineteen seconds after he'd left his desk to check on his latest work in progress.

This placed him, visibly, just inside the doorway of the vivisection laboratory and with his back to her. By the time he had stepped far enough from the door to be able to close it she had crossed the intervening space and was smiling a blithe smile at him.

"My slippers got blistered," she announced, proud. "May I have my wand back, Professor Sn--"

At which point the Tengu started to screech.

Luna's wide eyes widened and Snape interposed the door between her and himself. _Fine work, Severus. You're fit for the dissection bench yourself, miserable fool_

He hurried to the creature's extracted thorax and dripped several drops of tobacco juice to soften and silence it. The rest of the organs seemed to be working all right, though the bird's beady eye-- the one closer to him-- was bloodshot and murderous. He reached for the sugar water and a syringe: even though dismembered, the creature had to be fed, else it died. It was the lamentable disadvantage of life. He preferred his materials cut and dried, the drier the better; like children, living things were soft and inconstant and altogether too fond of screeching.

"_Alohomora_?" he heard Luna suggest to the door, and realised with a shudder that he'd left her wand in his outer cloak, which he had shed in his office on account of its cumbersome sleeves, which had no place in the vivisection room where precision was a three-dimensional thing. He also realised that he had forgotten to reset the wards on account of the Tengu. On account of which--

_Very good, Snape. Very good. Keep repeating yourself; maybe that will fix everything._

His gaze paused on the pans under the excretory tubes before turning to Luna. They were empty, which was not a good sign.

"Is that a Tengu?" squealed Luna helpfully. "I knew it; I knew they existed! Oh, Dad will be so pleased when I tell him!"

She seemed unruffled by the fact that her Potions master was elbow-deep in such a rare creature, or that it had been effectively turned inside-out, with each of its organs stretched to the full possible length of its connective tissue and suspended, pulsating, in the air.

"You will tell nobody, Miss Lovegood," he assured her.

Page ninety-four of the third volume of _Grubitz' Magical Bestiary_, Unchangeable Edition, has this to say on the subject:

_Tengu-- playful bird-goblin and changeling, rumoured to live in the East. Reports of actual sightings are rare although Marco the Magnificent swears that one of his travel companions had been personally robbed by a Tengu on the steppes of Mongolia, and a twelfth-century account of a delegation to Prester John mentions a similar animal. Usually taking the form of a crow or a kite, their favourite prey is monks who are unstrong in the faith. They can, however, also take the form of--_

The copy in the Hogwarts library sports an inerascible inkblot over the rest of the entry.


	4. chapter four

Disclaimer: disclaimed. Chapter clunks, so suggest. It's galling, but both Luna and Snape are OOC. (And just when I figured out where I'm going with this.) Galling, I say. What do you say?

AmZ: I have no idea who or what Cristobal Hunta and Niichevo might be, so no, it was not a nod to them. (Feel free to take it as one, however.) Luna's records will reappear-- and hopefully become audible-- later on.

Balthazar: Nora & Charles were random choices as names, so I'm curious as to what I've unwittingly referenced. Other than Cristobal Hunta of Niichevo, that is. Hrm... the fic seems to have taken a decidedly Rorsharch-esque turn.

* * *

Snape had been to the offices of the _Quibbler_ only once and many years earlier; he had put off that trip for so long it had threatened to become an existential crisis. In general his feelings about procrastination bore much resemblance to his feelings for theatrical wand-waving: both were for weak people, and both led to missed opportunities. He did things, therefore, when they had to be done. He wielded his wand, therefore, with a surgeon's precision. But the very thought of the other Lovegood, the father, made every first-year essay a far better use of his time. 

This Lovegood, however, was smiling at him-- or, rather, at the air an inch in front of him-- and Snape realised with a shudder that he would have preferred to have been dealing with her dad just this once.

At least he didn't smile like that.

Snape knew exactly what Dumbledore would advise him to do about Luna. He would advise him to serve Luna tea. He would advise him further to serve Luna poppyseed cake with the tea as a sweetener. He would then advise Snape about the relative merits of putting lemon rinds and vanilla in said cake, and would say (in a serious tone) that tea and poppyseed cake are the best means of convincing someone that they need not repeat what they'd seen. But something needed to be done about Luna and Snape was out of legal ideas, so he braced himself for a talk with the Headmaster. Tea and cake. He hoped for a miracle: it was rare, but sometimes Dumbledore surprised even him.

He locked up the vivisection room-- a process that took several minutes and seven languages (dead)-- and made his way to his desk. In passing he noted Luna's necklace of butterbeer caps and docked her five points for its presence. "Because it is a poor habit to bring things that might choke you into a laboratory, Miss Lovegood. Sit."

She sat. "But Professor--"

"You are in more trouble, Miss Lovegood, than either of us should care to imagine. Are you acquainted with chapter seventeen, section three, paragraph 1.2 of the Hogwarts Code of Conduct?"

"They're my records," Luna explained. "And you see, Professor--"

"Let me acquaint you with it," said Snape, shaking.

An old, very worn, very old and very worn copy of said Code appeared in the air a foot from Luna's face. The relevant passage was underlined, and featured words like "research facilities" and "trespassing" and "crime", and even-- in paragraph 1.2.66-- "Azkaban".

"People take my things, and I usually don't mind at all but since these were my Mum's--"

Spidery threads extended themselves from each letter and stretched toward Luna's eyes like thin fingers.

"And I'd be really sad if I lost them, not because they're my things, see, but because they were ooooowwwww!"

The spidery threads had attached themselves to the rim of Luna's pupils and had started worming their way inside. Snape let her howl for a delicious moment or so and then flicked his wand like a scalpel. The book fluttered drily away, and the threads, severed in two, dripped one by one down her face. They writhed a bit on the desk before vanishing.

"Did that get the point across, Miss Lovegood?"

It was odd to see the fishbowl eyes swollen and liquid and red, because-- come to think of it-- Snape had never seen Luna cry. But she nodded and even produced a counterintuitive smile between the many pained blinks. Remarkable, he thought. She can blink.

"Yes, Professor."

"Good." He filled two small shallow dishes with the cold tea he kept within easy reach throughout the room. "For your eyes. Keep them open."

This proved difficult, and loud, but presently she convinced her eyelids to stay open as she dipped her eyes in the tea. When she lifted her head-- droplets hanging from her invisible lashes, disconcertingly-- and told him that her mother too had used tea and poppy juice in her eyes when she'd had an accident once, and that it was so cold and nice, and that she felt very much better, thanks, her eyes looked almost normal again. Meanwhile Snape had taken a flask from the cabinet at the sink and poured out a gobletful of its contents.

"Yes, Miss Lovegood, the tea is cold, and it makes your eyes better, and you remain in a great deal of trouble. About this I must see the Headmaster at once."

She nodded.

"You are to stay here."

She nodded.

"You are not to touch anything."

She nodded, looking around as if happily reminded that there were things around her to touch. Snape moved her gaze back to his with a slight twitch of his finger.

"You are also in no way to attempt to gain entry to the back room. Regardless of what sounds you might hear coming from it."

She nodded again, now dutifully sombre-- in the way children are when they're quite enjoying themselves. For a moment she looked so pleased, in fact, that Snape wondered if she'd heard something completely different-- say, with the help of a Radio Yerevan charm.

"And if you touch anything, and if you tamper with anything at all, I will know. And the trouble in which you will _be_ will make the trouble in which you _are_ seem like a trip to Honeydukes'. Is this clear?"

"Yes, Professor."

He studied her for a moment, then, satisfied, handed her the goblet.

"Drink."

She did so, prompting Snape once again to alter the Ravenclaw score in exasperation.

"Have I taught you nothing? As orthogonal as you and reality might be, Miss Lovegood, in this world-- and in many others-- it is a poor idea to drink every goblet you're given. Poor, and often fatal. Even though you have a bottomless void for a mind, you ought to be able to grasp--"

"But I know it, Professor. It tastes purple."

Snape-- as if infected by her curious brand of logic-- found himself wondering whether he looked more or less purple than the potion tasted to her. Then the full weight of what she'd said hit him so hard he had to close his eyes for the length of a breath to steady himself.

"Mum would give it to me when I was little, when she couldn't actually watch me."

"Your mum."

"So she'd know what I'd been up to. I was always getting into her things, see, and I'd sometimes forget which ones she told me not to touch, and I'd always be getting sick because I ate something I shouldn't have, and so she needed to know what it was. So she could fix it," Luna explained helpfully. "Only she put mango juice in it, but it was still pretty purple."

"I see," Snape said, his body managing to move itself to the sink without any input from him. "Your mum."

Luna watched him grip the sink with the mildest of curiosities.

"I hardly need explain what it does, then," said Snape, after summoning enough bitterness to make his eyes glitter a bit. "Touch nothing."

And then he climbed into the sink.

When he liquefied himself into the drain he dimly heard Luna applauding. When he approached the first fork in the pipes he let himself be carried on past it, joining a startling amout of lavender-water (with which the Headmaster had just washed his hands) and the rest of the sewage of Hogwarts. Several hours later he emerged in the _Quibbler_'s office in London.


	5. chapter five

And now that Snape's in the drain, it's time for something completely different! I'll work on the transitions someday. But not today. No. Not today.

In the meantime, the Sues multiply: meet Luna's mum. Also, rating has gone up (in case cannibalism legally requires parental consent).

Incidentally, I've come up against a bit of a problem: there is a contradiction between the previous chapter and this one. See if you can spot it. Then see notes at the bottom.

* * *

Professor Sinistra published horoscopes under the name Agrippina Celeste. Snape learned this in the shop of Master Henry Mondeville, Apothecary, because Master Henry Mondeville, Apothecary, sold these horoscopes from the ornate rack next to his prized astranatomical charts — original Grunewalds and a sight of sights to behold: muscled bodies that peeled and dismembered and eviscerated themselves again and again to show the sign on each organ, all while dancing, merrily, into and out of their frames. The artist had been so skilled that blood actually pooled on the floor. 

This made Henry's clientele very much female, and thus very much superstitious. Hence the rack. The conceit was that since the members of the body were governed by the bodies in the sky, one could ensure that arms were not broken in Quidditch by paying attention to Gemini — and by paying three sickles to Henry. In return one would receive a pamphlet with charts and advice. This might have been a fair enough trade, but the pamphlet was invariably a smudged, grimy, and flimsy affair, printed at the press of Laurens Janszoon (a crook) with the help of an ancient technique (banned by departments of health), and was altogether the sort of thing one should have to be paid to read, not the other way round. The ink powdered off it in clouds. The letters all looked the same. The paper was brittle and sharp, so it could (wonder of wonders) crumble _and_ give paper-cuts at the same time. Yet the females insisted on buying, though they coughed and they spluttered and tore their Toad enCreamed hands in the process. Out of compassion — or, rather, whenever the planet Mercury indicated that people should go easier on their eyes — the venerable Agrippina published her thoughts in the _Quibbler's _"When Night Falls" supplement as well.

The _Quibbler_ had an astonishing number of supplements. One of them was a Guide to Divining the Future from the smudges in a Janszoon Press publication.

Snape had been waiting for Master H. Mondeville, Apothecary, to bring him his two thirteen-ounce jars of Candied Leper Gel. His previous supplier had been arrested by the Ministry — as had the three before him — for trafficking in Grade Two Controlled Substances (to wit, the uterine lining of a Wetbacked Flipperpithecine, a simian that was almost extinct). Snape had been vaguely amused. Human flesh was a Grade Five Controlled Substance; he'd considered it a compliment to his smuggler-picking skills that his dealers had been caught for something insignificant compared to what they were procuring for him. They were also the sort of people who came out of Azkaban with their heads clear and their principles intact, allowing Snape - at least in theory - to revert to his earlier sources upon their release. But in truth they were an unpredictable lot. The great Trevenen Huxley-Brown, for instance, had jilted Snape for the redheaded heiress of Manx, whose acquaintance he had somehow made while in Azkaban, and whose estate in the Rift Valley Ash Layers supported no less than three Magic mafia rings and not a few Muggle scientists. But Snape knew the risks. He had long ago realised how hard it is to compete with red hair.

Master Henry got his Candied Leper Gel through a certain monastic order, an ever efficient organisation. When Inquisition was in demand, they provided it. When brothels were in demand, they provided that too. And when leprosy demanded and was demanded, they provided. The world is a curious place, full of people who will die a slow death if it means several coins for their children and three meals, however sweet, every day. But that is a matter best told in Oscar Wilde's fairytales.

"That's… that's _immoral_! Illegal!" the earnest Granger-esque types would whine. "It is a violation of human rights!"

Of course they'd mean the injustices done to the poor, not Oscar Wilde's fairytales — which, though peopled with rosy-lipped boys, are not in themselves illegal. As to the other matter, a small store-cupboard, carefully disguised as a potted plant on one of Snape's upper shelves, contained such delicacies as pickled House-Elf feet, Goblin noses, naughty bits of Veela, the petrous portion of two giants' temporals, and a jar of assorted eyes (nerves attached). Every one of them was legal with a license, and most had been removed while their owner had still been alive. The calculus of suffering has coefficients. It was a little-known detail in the Legal Code that House-Elves could be freed not just by receiving clothes but by selling various things that clothes cover.

"But it's immoral! It _should be_ illegal!" the earnest Granger-esque types would whine if they knew, but fortunately they were too high on the moral high ground to notice or wonder about such things. So they sliced their bat-eyes and slivered their fish-scales, and passed their OWLs and their NEWTs thinking that Potionmaking was just like making porridge for breakfast only with sillier steps. Master Henry's thirteen-ounce jars (labelled "Hippogriff earwax — for external use only!") would perhaps make them think lofty thoughts, none of which would be to open a jar for a sniff. For who wants to sniff Hippogriff earwax? It's only known use, as it happens, is for a rarely-used spell in which a candle is doused with the stuff, lit again, and inhaled, transforming the inhaler into a hippogriff for all of three minutes.

The Gel was exactly what its unlabelled name suggests. It had to be imported, of course. England and Scotland were for the most part devoid of lepers, and while there were rumoured to be some in Wales, they were also rumoured to have self-respect. So the lepers had to be candied elsewhere. To this end they began eating honey. They ate nothing but honey all day: lavender honey, black honey, rose-hip honey; drank honey-water and pissed honey piss. Eventually they would die, for man cannot live by honey alone. They would then be sealed in vats of honey for a hundred years, while their flesh honeyed and bones honeyed and their eyeballs honeyed too; and after the hundred years they'd be opened and boiled and condensed and bottled and sold and consumed. Which _was_ illegal. But the Wolfsbane Potion requires courage and skill to brew not because it corrodes the cauldron, like the potion called Insidious Green, and not because it tends to explode, like the Inverse Kent-Jones Potion of Discovery, and not even because it turns the brewer into an ingredient — like a potion so tightly controlled I can't even mention its name — but because it requires three dripping spoonfuls of human flesh in each pot.

This had been discovered by Luna Lovegood's mum. It was also an offense worth twenty years in Azkaban and life in St. Mungo's thereafter.

"Healers from the ancient Romans to the Muggle dabbler Louis Pasteur have known that _sola_ _dosis facit venenum_, that poison is only made by its quantity," Dumbledore had read, deliberately, glancing over the parchment at Snape from time to time. "From this principle follows another: that every antidote contains a drop of its poison."

"Yes, Headmaster," Snape had said, who had known this before he could talk.

"The analysis in this report will prove that the danger posed to humans by werewolves can be reduced or removed if they are given a small measure of human flesh, proportional to such variables as the age of the individual and the amount of time elapsed since the bite —"

"I am unprepared to go to Azkaban to make your pet werewolf docile, Headmaster," Snape had said icily.

Dumbledore had made an oblique reference to some of the other materials in Snape's laboratorium. "And surely the final cause eclipses any irregularities in the material cause?"

"My objection has little to do with Aristotle."

"Now, now, Severus. Have some Turkish Delight."

Snape had bitten the words out of the air. "I believe _this_ werewolf a threat regardless of the time of month, Headmaster. You are of course free to drug your judgment by drugging him, but I want no part of it."

There had followed a blatant attempt to bribe Snape with the promise of patent rights to the potion.

"I am not a Muggle pharmaceutical company," Snape had snarled, quickly looking away. His instincts had been bristling. With a breath he'd pulled the plug of his mind until only a faint aftertaste of disgust had coated his insides: no headgames, Headmaster; not now. _Not you_.

"The Order of Merlin is given to treatments for contagious _problems_ such as lycanthropy."

"Why, Headmaster, surely you do not think me so much a Slytherin as to accept an honour I've done nothing to deserve," a voice — almost his own — had replied. "Theodoric clearly has a much more avid interest in werewolf physiology than I; perhaps he could be persuaded to brew the potion himself."

"Herself," Dumbledore had corrected, and thus the story had come out. Theodoric had worked with the Order, though his — her — contacts with Snape had been sporadic: an exchange of recipes mostly related to the gathering of information. To Theodoric Snape had been Paracelsus. Under Theodoric's directive he'd coated his fingers with a peculiar brew one afternoon and the words of the Death Eaters had stuck to them. Under his directive Theodoric had spent a full month vivisecting a Tengu in order to use its vital forces for watching the Floo network. Their collaboration had yielded results, but even after the end Snape had known nothing more about Theodoric than that his wand had an bat-finger core.

He had suppressed any curiosity a weaker man would have entertained about the identity of his dance-partner. Curiosity was a hole. Curiosity cut through defenses: the lacuna of information in one's mind, being a lacuna, was easier to overlook from inside. _Theodoric? I do not know Theodoric. I have no information about Theodoric. I do not know anything about Theodoric at all. _To such thoughts one had to pay special attention, because they were enough to reveal — should anyone look in one's mind at an inopportune time — that there was a Theodoric to know. Snape had covered his shelves in the writings of the real thirteenth-century Theodoric and other anonymous texts; Theodoric had presumably dusted off his — her — copies of Paracelsus. Marginal notes in the one by the one would rewrite a chapter or two in the other for the other. Thus they communicated; and thus the curiosity could be changed enough, linked enough to a real otherness, to be hidden. _I am studying the arcane recipes of a thirteenth-century monk. Care to look, Master_? They'd derived this system simultaneously, at first with dangerous bombast. The second volume of Theodoric's _Chirurgia_ had flown onto Snape's desk and settled, fluttering, to a section written in a conspicuously different hand; at around the same time the _Grosse Wundartzney_ of Paracelsus had opened to a page on which certain letters, randomly, had gone red. It had taken them two weeks to smoothe out the glitches and put in the safe-guards. And now —

"Theodoric can't brew the potion because Theodoric is dead, Severus."

"Theodoric has been dead for eight hundred years, Headmaster," empty Snape had replied without thinking. "I find it emblematic of Muggle stupidity that none of his ideas, which he was good enough to share with them, took hold for so many hundreds of years."

When he'd returned to his chambers with the parchment and let his body go limp in a chair there had been triumph mixed in with the sorrow. It was a very Slytherine triumph: there was no more Lily Evans; there was no more Theodoric; he was alone.

He'd remembered Dorothea Eitmann vaguely, a reedy Ravenclaw girl several years older than him. She had never been on Slughorn's list of desirables.

Presently he'd taken down the _Chirurgia_, volume one, from where it had migrated, neglected, to the very edge of a shelf. Things between them had gone back to normal. They had reverted to Dumbledore as a go-between on the rare occasions when they had something to share; of late Theodoric had focused on various classes of charms. The book had lain unopened for years. Yet in the front was a note — new, and very short.

_And thus I, Master Theodoric, took down the words of my friend and teacher, for he said to me that he wished it, in order that if the Lord called him his knowledge, though unfinished, would not yet be gone from the race of men._

The unfinished knowledge had begun two pages later: disembodied sentences, scraps of inspiration, sometimes a whole recipe or the outline of principles underlying one. At the very end of the entries he'd found the same recipe he'd taken from Dumbledore.

It had been sparse, and beautiful without the florid academic argot. _Take of human flesh three units—_

Snape had closed his eyes, finally letting himself fill to the brim with the reactions he'd put off and the thoughts he hadn't quite thought about Theodoric. During the war it had been too dangerous for them to dwell on each other, and after the war - pointless. But Theodoric had mattered. He'd been (she'd been) a friend, pristine, uncluttered with the personhood of friendship. Uncluttered with such flaws as being married to Simon Lovegood, for instance. Perhaps there was a correlation, an as-yet-unexplored principle, that required all girls with skills in potion-making to fall in love with worms. (A promising if painful line of research.)

He'd let himself ache for exactly four seconds before forcing himself back into the flesh, and the three units, and — as it turned out — the note after them.

_My friend and teacher believed that the hunger would be sated with a single drop of nectar, but it was not. My friend and teacher believed that the hunger would be sated with a leaf, but it was not. My friend and teacher believed that the hunger would be sated with a flower, but it was not. Thus my friend and teacher abandoned the brew, and rent his garment and put ashes on his head, saying "Cursed be the mother that bore me, and cursed the day I was born, for I have nothing more than a drop and a leaf and a flower to give to this hunger and it has eaten them up." But I, Master Theodoric, have found —_

It ended there, presumably for him to continue.

He'd shuddered, wondering if a flower was a hand and Dora Lovegood had actually hacked bits off herself to throw in the cauldron. When he'd tapped the note (_Sic_, he'd whispered, not because he needed to) the words had dissolved into a single line in Theodoric's own scrawl.

_Bugger it P, can you do anything with this mess?_

He had carefully read through the recipe.

He had carefully read it again.

Theodoric's most annoying trait had been that he — she — rarely finished anything all the way, preferring instead to point out the raw stones of an idea and let Snape extract them and scrape and perfect. The opposite had been true on occasion as well, but Snape had caught on almost at once that Theodoric was — had been? — something of a Renaissance man (before the Renaissance, of course, and a woman): encumbered with the breadth of too many disciplines and too much imagination to linger on any one for too long. There must have been others like himself, polishing the rest of her brilliant handwaving. So Snape had been unsurprised to see that the potion, as written, was useless; though he did not tell Dumbledore at the time. The calculations were correct. The principles were correct. The potion, however, had failed to work; and this had intrigued him enough, werewolf or no, to make him accept Theodoric's last scribbles from the ever twinkle-eyed Headmaster.

_Take of human flesh three units—_

Hardly a wonder he'd taken to Potions, he'd thought bitterly. It was the only subject at school which required one to make a _perfectly controlled mess_ and then clean it up with precision. Not a spine of snodgrass was unnecessary. If a drop of newt blood was required, neither omitting it nor putting in two was acceptable. What an antidote for the slapdash way people romped through life, like elephants, leaving the forces of God (or Nature, or just someone else) to set everything right afterward. But Theodoric made uncontrolled messes like this one, which only proved that her mind was really not fit for Potionmaking. He'd taken the liberty of a smile.

The answer had came to him during his third class a week later. It was fourth-year Ravenclaw-Slytherin, an unpleasant dynamic, and he had just let his thoughts meander to the inefficiencies of the educational system when Wesley Perkins, Ravenclaw, had yelped. His potion had started to grow.

"I — I'm sorry, Sir, I don't think I —"

"One is supposed to consume the potion, Perkins, not the other way round," Snape had said, lazily watching the sticky mass as it developed something like arms, or hammers, one of which attached itself to Perkins' pale hair. In the cauldron a hole had appeared, large, cavernous, and suspiciously mouth-like, to which Perkins' head was now being dragged.

"No, please, Sir…"

"Attend to your own potions," Snape had snapped at the class, waving the potion away. "Now, Perkins —"

Perkins was trying to pull off the sticky globs that Snape had been considerate enough to leave in his hair.

"Whatever possessed you to put so much Czech Yeast in your cauldron? Did you not read the instructions? Did you not hear me say, explicitly, that too much yeast will cause an uncontrollable chain reaction?"

"I only put a drachm in, Sir, just like it says on the board! I even re-read it three times because you said —"

"I see. Perhaps you might read it again for my benefit, Perkins, aloud."

Perkins had done so.

"Very good, Perkins. And what is a drachm?"

Perkins had taken a little blue knob, carefully labelled "1 drm", from one of the balances of the scale before him.

"Not good enough, I'm afraid. What is this?"

Snape had rather enjoyed himself. Perkins' face had grown very pale as he realised that the much littler green knob Snape had held up was also labelled "1 drm."

"Always remember your units," Snape had turned from the unfortunate boy. "You are using _Venetian_ drachms, not Veronese ones. The difference is substantial. Ah, Levitt, you seem concerned…"

And it was while Levitt had tried to beat his potion back into the pot that Snape had understood Theodoric's difficulty. After class he'd extracted an obscure book from the library using a complicated charm and settled down to the calculations. Sometime after midnight he'd extracted three more books from the library. Sometime after four in the morning he'd been fairly sure he'd figured out which of them Theodoric had used as a reference. As dawn was breaking an error had appeared, seeming to indicate that Theodoric had in fact used two of the books, working through the calculations once with the information from one, then re-working them with the other — except where she'd forgotten to change one of the numbers, presumably because it had been a long night for her too. After he'd thoroughly re-checked everything he'd gone to his nine o'clock lesson, which had been an unpleasant experience for everyone involved. He'd skipped lunch. By the time the Hufflepuffs had been dismissed from their two-thirty class he'd given thirteen detentions and Minerva had had the nerve to ask him if he was all right. Two hours and a draught of a Cat Tonic later he'd been more or less rested enough to tackle the calculations again, this time substituting all the relevant numbers from the third book. After checking to make sure that the Slytherins were all in their dungeon for the night he'd extracted twelve books from the library and checked a passage in each one. And sometime around midnight he'd let himself collapse, too tired to even feel pleased.

"All right," he'd told Dumbledore the next day. "I'll brew this abomination, if all expenses are defrayed. Also I'd prefer it if the recipe remains quiet and classified."

"What about sharing knowledge with the rest of the academic community?" the headmaster had said sweetly. Snape's response had been a particularly potent glare.

"You must know, Severus, that Mrs. Lovegood's report to the Ministry has lately been rediscovered. It seems that werewolf matters are considered a high priority as of late. I'm told that the Department of Ingestables, Inhalables, and Balms has even commissioned clinical trials of it."

"I'm sure your influence was minimal, Headmaster."

"It actually was. The driving force appears to be one Damocles Belby of Belby Thaumaceuticals, Inc. Do you know him? He seems to think it a good idea to boost his company's image in the werewolf community — and, of course, to corner a neglected market."

Snape had waited while Dumbledore ate a marzipan beetle.

"I'm told that the clinicaltrials are about to commence, in fact. Do have one, Severus, I find them excellent for the nerves."

"I am not going to work for Belby, Headmaster, nor with him. Is it not enough that I've agreed to brew this potion every month for the rest of my life?"

"I'm only suggesting that perhaps it would be a good opportunity for you to contribute to your field, get involved in the academic community."

That hated word again. One of Snape's nostrils had twitched. His academic field was about as communal as its medieval counterpart, where every village and hillock had its own metric system.

Which had been the potion's problem all along. Because human flesh was such a controlled substance, there were few references for its use and no consensus on how to quantify it. Theodoric had made a reasonable guess on the basis of one source, a fourteenth-century book written in England, which source had used an earlier source, a Parisian manuscript dated to 1312. The English book converted the Parisian units into English ones, and Theodoric had worked with both sources far enough to see that they would give the same result. Unfortunately the Parisian book did not really use Parisian units but Bolognese ones, having copied a substantial part of its material from a thirteenth-century book from Bologna; and the author had neither converted the units nor indicated that they were different. Theodoric, with her typical lack of thoroughness, had not discovered the earliest manuscript; and the later academics had obviously never brewed the knowledge before they'd copied and shared it. Academia was an excellent thing.

"The recipe Theod — ah, Mrs. Lovegood — filed with the Ministry is useless, Headmaster. Belby is too much of a nitwit to concern himself with setting it right; his only concern is to sell it. What is it that you want from me?"

"Perhaps you should let him discover it, Severus."

"I see."

A thousand Slytherine instincts had turned him first pink and then purple. The headmaster had smiled at him for a time and then helpfully waved a glass of tea onto the table before him.

"If I understand correctly, Headmaster, you are asking me to give the fixed recipe to Belby and watch while he wins the Order of Merlin for Medicine."

"Something like that. We primarily want the clinical trials to go smoothly. He won't be allowed to mass-produce it, of course, given its main ingredient, and I shall make sure he doesn't get patent rights either. But I think it wise for the potion to exist, and to be known, even if few Potionmakers will actually make it. It will otherwise be very difficult for me to convince the Ministry to let me hire a werewolf."

There had been a crescendo of vitriol on Snape's part during the ensuing conversation. The headmaster had been unreceptive to all arguments about the folly of hiring any werewolf and especially this one, and suggested that Severus drink his tea.

"Anise-flavoured, though not too strong. And a hint of rosehip, I believe, though I would defer to your judgement on that point."

"Why Belby? A thousand other more competent people —"

"I'm disinclined to draw attention to _you_ at the moment, Severus, for reasons that should be clear. He's interested; it would be absurd to use someone else as a front. Sugar?"

In the end he had agreed, as sour as the potion itself. It had taken him two full months to research the market. When he'd presented his exorbitant budget the headmaster had approved it without so much as a frown. It had taken two more months to brew the quantities necessary for the clinical trials, and two more for the results to be properly analysed. Snape had received news of the potion's approval with about as much joy as a summons to Azkaban. It was small comfort that the potion remained controlled, unmarketable, and utterly useless to Belby — in spite of his inevitable award — as he did not even know how to brew it.

Thus Snape came to be waiting for his supplies at Master Henry's shop of horrors — a hooded figure with a scything nose, adding to the ambiance.

He'd been waiting for some time. Master Mondeville was in the back room, fondling the contents of some box. There was absolutely no point or purpose to fetishising one's ingredients, but the apothecary had a fondness for civet balm and mushrooms (one of which he would sniff while stroking the other) and showed no indication of finishing with them anytime soon. Snape had paced. He'd contemplated the anatomical charts. He'd found an error in them. He'd glanced idly at the rack of pamphlets.

The very latest (on a shelf labelled "The Very Latest!") concerned kidneys, and how the stars cared for them, and which stars had already crossed them, and what to pay to do something about it. But in small print towards the bottom of the cover was another comment:

_For the stars predict the future of kingdoms and kings. It is up to us to stay on the right side of the stars and the kingdoms and kings._

Which, as it happened, had been Sinistra's precise words of advice to Snape at the end of their last midnight kvetch-session. They'd concerned, of all things, the Babylonians.

* * *

Notes: the Candied Leper Gel is historically accurate, although any hermit (not just a leper) would do. Various names have been cribbed from various historical figures. Theodoric really was a thirteenth-century surgeon, who put great emphasis on cleanliness and the undesirability of pus.

The contradiction between this chapter and the previous one is that I forgot that, in the previous chapter, Snape decides to visit Herr Lovegood because he realises that Luna's mum was his anonymous collaborator back in the day. In this chapter Dumbledore tells him. That my chronology is fuzzy is also true. Any and all suggestions are welcome -- particularly as regards fixing the previous chapter, since the next chapters reference this one rather than chapter four.


	6. chapter six

And now that we've mentioned Sinistra, forget her. She'll crop up later, but not for a while. Transitions, transitions... (sigh).

In the meantime the Sues multiply _yet again._ Not that Sinistra won't be a Sue, but first you have to meet Luna's dad. Oh, yes. Hooray for Sues.

* * *

The offices of the _Quibbler_ were in an old warehouse that had been left dingy in an almost studied sort of way. Graffiti artists had long been using it as a canvas for all manner of comment, a practice the editorial board encouraged as an expression of democracy. The façade peeled in many places. The gilt logo of the _Quibbler_ was cobbled together from letters of different sizes and shapes which constantly had to be replaced due to their popularity as souvenirs with the college-age crowd. A previous owner had assembled a graveyard of gargoyles — pinched from other buildings — on the roof. Homeless bundles nursed their wine against its periphery, though only one or two of them would be there at any given time. 

Muggles who passed the building thought it just dodgy enough to be a front for the Mossad (or the CIA, or some Libyan terrorist network), though the logic underlying these thoughts was hard to pin down and probably wrong. Perhaps it had something to do with the clean hair of the homeless folk.

Inside the scene appeared to be one of happy anarchy. So many languages were spoken on certain floors that one might have thought oneself at a marketplace in the Third World. Flora and fauna of kingdoms magical and mundane graced the interior. Lovegood's staff ranged the gamut from little old ladies (some with cats, present) to Hogwarts dropouts to aging tenors to millionaires and Muggles. ("They fit in perfectly," he had explained to the Ministry when asked about the Muggles. "Some of them wear robes. They think we're quite normal.") More than one hidden genius, dissatisfied with the world outside, had found his way to the bosom of Mr. Lovegood and his endless understanding: he allowed holidays whenever one's religion dictated them regardless of whether said religion had more than one adherent.

The downside of running Noah's Ark, however, was that one was constantly being investigated by authorities. As a result fully half the staff had jobs centred around procuring the necessary permits, stamps, signatures, and goodwill required to keep the enterprise afloat (and as inconspicuous in its workings as possible). A number of brilliant minds devised ways for the things that got written by the _Quibbler_'s vast network of familiars, paid and unpaid, to find their way into the building unobstructed, as very few people with access to the warehouse actually wrote anything. A key department merged the magic and Muggle editions of the _Quibbler_ into a single physical entity that would read as either magic or Muggle depending on the eyes of the beholder. A legal team lived in the basement. For all its cacaphony the _Quibbler _was remarkably organised.

And in fact one could be forgiven for thinking that Lovegood presided over a particularly ersatz intelligence apparatus. He did nothing to disabuse anyone of the impression. The _Quibbler_ simply made sure it was considered an intelligence apparatus of the insane.

Snape's dislike of all things Lovegood ostensibly had its roots in two old grievances: Lovegood's contribution to the _Levicorpus_ disaster, and his lack of contribution to the near-disaster of the werewolf bait. The Hogwarts-only predecessor of the _Quibbler_ had been the staircase leading to the Divination classroom, where writing appeared on the walls and disappeared when it had outlived its interest, or at the end of the week. Dumbledore had turned a benign eye to it when it had been pointed out by professors displeased with having the pattern of their underpants be made a matter of public discourse.

"Now, now, Maskelyne. You know the forces of Divination are mysterious. If they have chosen to speak to this wall, who are we to disagree?"

"But Headmaster, I _do not_ wear… I mean, purple lizards!"

"Yes, the forces of Divination are mysterious like that," the headmaster had smiled.

Interspersed with the blatant mythmongering, however, had been nuggets of truth so pointed they could make one's hair grey, and did. The victims typically pretended these nuggets too were as absurd as the wall's claim that a Tessaresdecatite was loose in the Charms classroom, but it was impossible to erase their influence completely. Had Silvia Berthoud not been sent home after the wall tipped everyone off to her addiction to a certain Egyptian drug? More than one friendship had grown strained. Revenge had been plotted against the anonymous author. Notes of protest had been scribbled on the wall, but they'd disappeared as if into quicksand. Snape had become convinced of the Wall's importance one afternoon when it came out with a long list of Dark paraphernalia hidden around the castle, three items of which had belonged to him, and which - he was sure of it - he had hidden _very_ well.

The Wall had had no discernible agenda. It had seemed to think some things unfair, but also published things it thought humourous or educational, such as the Guide to Playing Records without a Record Player. Snape had figured out the identity of the culprit on the basis of that very essay, having discovered Lovegood doing his Arithmancy homework by wandlight in a broom closet while _The Marriage of Figaro _spun merrily over his head. Proof positive: the essay had appeared the very next day.

Dumbledore had been dismissive of the news, Malfoy marginally more so. "Lovegood? My dear Severus, one would need to be brilliant to engineer something like the Wall, and I assure you Lovegood is perfectly ordinary. My sources indicate that Dumbledore himself is behind it. Just the sort of thing the old man would find amusing, no?"

"How do you do it?" Snape had demanded upon cornering Lovegood once in the owlery. "How do you get inside their bloody offices?" And then in an unforgivable moment of weakness he'd added, "Teach me."

Lovegood had been, and remained, the calmest person Snape had ever met. "I'm afraid the cardinal rule of journalism is to never reveal one's sources," he'd replied without the merest hint of malice.

He'd also frozen Snape's hand without the merest hint of malice when Snape, irked by his manner, had wisely reached for his wand.

That had been in Snape's first year. By his third he had noticed that the Wall was keeping score of the Snape-Marauders love affair, a detail so strange he at first thought he was inventing it. But there it was: his wand had accidentally brushed a spot on one of the steps and it had spread into a miniscule image of Potter hexing him. A quick check of the other marks had yielded similar results. He'd actually skipped Potions that day, instead spending the afternoon in trying to unravel the Arithmancy behind the thing, because — a miracle — the Wall seemed to believe that he was ahead. Thereafter he'd checked the step after each encounter with the Gryffindors, and each time a new set of marks had appeared. He'd even tested it a few times, resisting the impulse to retaliate when Black made his eyes water, for instance, to see how the Wall would record the encounters — and had apparently earned himself points for self-restraint.

Peculiarly enough, Lovegood had been gone by then. To the best of Snape's recollections he'd only been at Hogwarts during Snape's first year, but Snape didn't entirely trust those recollections. Perhaps he'd been a Sixth Year. Or perhaps he had been a Seventh Year after all. Or perhaps he'd taken his NEWTs early. In any case Lovegood had been much older than him.

Which made it all the more peculiar - but wasn't everything Lovegood peculiar? - that he'd been so _around_. Seventh Years didn't talk to First Years. And yet he'd appear out of nowhere when Snape was alone and talk to him about Kafka for no discernible purpose. Typically he would not even acknowledge Snape in the hallways for months afterward, contriving to not hear if Snape wanted to talk about something of import, until he'd appear again, out of nowhere, and talk about Borges or Wilde or Ecclesiastes. With perfect calm, this, and for no discernible purpose. Ever.

"What do you want from me?" Snape had once asked him.

The question had not interested Lovegood enough to provoke a reply, and Snape wouldn't have understood the fine theoretical concepts like "reinforcing behaviour" that Lovegood had been working on at the time. He also wouldn't have believed the simplest answer, which was that Lovegood rather liked Snape, or at least had positive feelings for the boy - much the same way one likes certain half-forgotten books on one's shelf and, on impulse, picks them up from time to time to re-read a passage or two.

The Wall had continued to operate (according to principles unknown) for several years before it became silent and white. It was eventually replaced by the _Quibbler_; a pestilence yet more intolerable as its back issues did not vanish at the end of a week.

Snape had just managed to put Lovegood out of his mind entirely — his attention being occupied with Potter and Evans and the rest of the school, and their occupation with him, and the horror of it — when Annie Snodgrass, second-year Gryffindor and keen fan of the _Quibbler_, emitted a shriek at breakfast:

"You guys, look at this! There's been a lynching at Hogwarts!"

Annie Snodgrass often shrieked. Shrieks, in fact, were her preferred form of communication. They typically concerned Rufus Wormwrite, a singer as popular with the editorial board of the _Quibbler_ as he was with hormonal females, but Potter and Black (as well as a rotating cast of other boys) were shrieked over often as well. So it had taken a moment for the importance of this particular shriek to sink in.

"No, seriously…" Her mouth had opened into a very wide and delighted cavern. "We had a _lynching_! Four Gryffindor boys... Wait, hey, Potter - wasn't that...?"

Word of the goings-on at Hogwarts rarely leaked to the world outside, which is why a small crowd formed around Annie Snodgrass at once.

"What's a lynching?" Pip Robichaux had asked. She was a first-year and short on vocabulary.

"It's like an orgy, stupid," Annie had begun as Snape slipped out of the Great Hall.

Lovegood's two-page spread had touched on everything from Kristallnacht to Jim Crow, mentioned Freud, hinted dark hints about the Inquisition, and concluded that the four Gryffindor boys — two of whom were described as being from unrespectable but respected old families — ought to be put on trial at once, with a stint at the Eymerich Correction Home (known as "Azkaban Jr.") as punishment, particularly since they had a prior record of such misdemeanours. It was a masterpiece, as dense on details as it was on hyperbole. Snape had not put his wand away all week. Neither had the Gryffindor boys, some of whom, for the first time in their lives, had discovered their family loyalty. Worse, Snape's mother had sent him a Stinger so vitriolic that three doses of rose-balm had failed to put down the swelling.

How very like Mum, Snape had thought bitterly; punishing me for not defending myself by depriving me of the use of my hands.

Stingers were considered child abuse, and therefore illegal. Snape's own loyalties had made it impossible for him to go to Madam Lovelace at the infirmary, so he had suffered in silence and slept little, maddening himself instead with choicy thoughts of torture aimed at Lovegood, the Gryffindors, and society at large. He had perversely earned a bit of admiration in his own house, however, for having connections in the press.

His disconnection in the press had even had the nerve to send him a note with instructions on how to get into the old warehouse should the need ever arise, knowing full well that Snape - then and for several years after - would not have the skills necessary to get into the drain.

Snape felt the wards on the sink skim his robes, prod his eyes and fingers, then force his mouth open and run themselves over his teeth. Brilliant. There was only one version of the Polyjuice Potion which took full account of biometric data, and the recipe for that one was even more restricted than _Moste Potente Potions_: a single copy resided in the Liquid Patent Office at the Ministry, a single copy was encoded in one of Snape's notebooks, and a single copy was in a drawer in what had been Dora Lovegood's study. The Wizarding world had had to keep up with the Muggles, after all; at the time _Moste Potente Potions_ was written anthropometry would have seemed laughable. So the transformational charms, the tooth-straighteners, the Polyjuice — all were no more precise than a first impression; and all regularly cost lives on the Floo Network. Incompetence was as much a fact of the magic as of the Muggle world.

The good editor was in his office, reading letters from his flock. After the death of his wife he had apparently taken to religious headgear - a fact Snape noted with some discomfort. He had also traded the thin grace of his youth for a structure of lines and shadows: still graceful, but with ominous depths holding the bones together; skin thin and architectured as a spiderweb. Small parentheses had appeared around the mouth. The glasses framed the same light eyes in deeper sockets. Yet the forehead was taut and clear. It appeared Lovegood wasn't worrying himself overmuch, at least not habitually.

"Professor Snape. Good evening."

Simon Lovegood was a Hufflepuff: a decision the Sorting Hat had made before the little blonde boy had gotten anywhere near the chair.

"You're a Hufflepuff," his future wife had intoned, towards the end of their first conversation. She had been a Ravenclaw and a year ahead of him. She had also been blunt in matters of import.

"Yes."

"Don't you think the Sorting Hat made a mistake?"

Simon had allowed a tendril of smile to escape the corner of his mouth. "I don't."

She'd scrutinised him. "Why's that? You know what they say about Hufflepuffs in Ravenclaw."

"_Gutta cavat lapidem_," he'd replied. This was not what Ravenclaws said about Hufflepuffs at all; but it was the sort of drop that wore away stones of prejudice where Ravenclaws were concerned.

"Well..."

She'd thought about this for a time, which Simon had noted with complaisance. Then she'd said, "Well, I suppose it works. We call you a wastebasket taxon — if we're feeling kind — but from taxonomy via paleoanthropology we get to taphonomy, to erosion, and to _gutta cavat lapidem _— not quite the same thing, but with a bit of imagination..."

This had been her peculiar genius: to take a thought and let it domino into other thoughts until Mongolia had become a Potions ingredient. It later helped save lives. At school, however, it had been very annoying. Few people could stand Dora Eitmann other than those who were so self-absorbed they didn't listen to what she said: it was just too much effort trying to keep up with her bridgeless hops and jumps.

"If I ever had a band," she'd added touchingly, just before she fled down the staircase to class, "I'd call it Wastebasket Taxon. You know I have a guitar made from the skeleton of a Codswallop?"

Lovegood had reacted as calmly to the _coup de foudre _as he did to everything else. His thoughts were an endless series of permutations of various eventualities, constantly being recalculated; he'd simply erased the futures that did not account for love and a wife from his mind and started learning Dora. She'd liked scarves and democracy.

"Your daughter, Lovegood, is becoming a nuisance."

The cleaning charms had missed a spot on Snape's shoulder, which Lovegood discreetly caused to vanish while waving two teacups toward the samovar in the corner.

"She has been a nuisance since her first day — it seems to run in the family — and she has lately become too much of a nuisance, and I strongly suggest you do something. The consequences could be grave for reasons that have nothing to do with me."

"Have a cup. I forget - do you drink it the Russian way, with a spot of jam alongside?" A flick of his wand brought an array of possible jams into the air between them. "I recommend the kvetchnfruit; it turned out beautifully this year."

"Do _not_ play Dumbledore with me," said Snape, unamused.

"I'm not; I'm cold," said Lovegood. The jars flew back to the shelf behind him in a graceful arc. "She rather likes you, you know. I'm sure she's not trying to be a nuisance intentionally."

"Of course not. She is completely devoid of intention, attention, and all the other qualities that make people human; but she does know how to talk. This has proved unfortunate more than once."

"Has it? I was under the impression that out of all her teachers you're the most tolerant of her comments."

"Tell me more," Snape hissed, "because this is a very odd impression to be under. Though of course if you get your impressions from _her_ it's hardly surprising."

Lovegood regarded him with an _ex_pression gotten from her. (Snape twitched. He'd be _smiling_ like her next. Azkaban was surely preferable to staring at this inanity.) "Well..."

"Are you also under the impression that gandywooks and silverillipedes abduct Filch from time to time?"said Snape helpfully. "Or that McGonagall puts brandy in her tea? Or that Dumbledore spends his nights at Madam Rosmerta's?"

"Well, unlike most of the staff you actually _hear_ her," Lovegood, said, bemused.

"How lucky for them. But I don't suppose you've told her to ask Flitwick if he hails from a long race of jellyfish or something."

"You're right, I haven't."

"How negligent of you."

The jar of kvetchnfruit preserve was back in the air, where a little silver plate and littler silver spoon rose to meet it.

"I've discovered a reference to his having some goblin blood in him, however, which I'm not sure I believe, but no jellyfish."

"You of _all _people dare to be the arbiter of bloodlines," Snape said softly. The rims of his nostrils had gone white. Lovegood did not appear to find this worrying at all, though if Snape had turned to a student with a similar expression the student would have withered into nothingness at once.

"What are you saying, Severus? _Are_ you part goblin?"

For the second time and in a similar rage Snape found himself drawing on Lovegood, but this time restrained himself before the wand was out of his sleeve. In their previous such encounter he had been sent flying across Knockturn Alley in a full-body bind. He'd been foolish: to draw on a more experienced older boy knowing his disadvantage was bad enough; to do it knowing his wand was quivering with emotion was unforgivable. The lesson had been learned, of course. To all appearances Lovegood did not move an eyelash. To all appearances Lovegood had not moved an eyelash then, though the first thing Snape had noticed after the spell had hit him was the wand that had not been in Lovegood's hand. Snape's curse had been partly blocked and more than partly mis-aimed.

"I think it a poor idea to waste your new lease on life in cursing everyone," Lovegood had said to him, gently. And he'd turned and walked away.

It had been a betrayal of the grossest magnitude when the werewolf debacle had gone unremarked. Snape hadn't been sure what he'd expected of Lovegood, but surely those desultory conversations had been indicative of _something_ - a loyalty without obligations, perhaps, if not a friendship; an allegiance of sorts; a nod of belonging. If the step with the tally was not meant as encouragement, what was it?

There was simply no way Lovegood could have not known. The Wall had known everything. It had had blades of grass in its employ, or insects; it had reported goings-on in the Forest; it had had sources inside the Lake. It had somehow overheard conversations happening in the girls' bathroom at the Three Broomsticks. It had reported the composition of the liquid that Potter had poured into Evans' pumpkin juice with startling precision. In Snape's world the Wall (or was it Lovegood?) had become, quite literally, the Big Brother of proverb.

He had seethed quietly, vowing to strangle Lovegood on the first possible occasion, and working out a very nice curse for the purpose.

As far as anyone could tell, however, Lovegood had disappeared off the face of the earth after finishing school. The vow had had to wait. Snape suspected-- a suspicion that had only gotten stronger over the years-- that some sort of military stint had been served, perhaps one featuring code names and champagne and people known as "agents", but of course there had been no way to tell. In any case it had been a surprise to discover Lovegood in Knockturn Alley one summer, looking normal, perusing some unintelligible bit of graffiti and adjusting his glasses as if he had never done anything wrong in his life.

Feeling _very _mature, Snape had proceeded to deliver some scathing remarks (which, mercifully, he no longer recalled) and had drawn his wand in the fever of a delusion in which he, at fourteen, brought all the forces that had ever wronged him grovelling to their knees. His wand had described an operatic arc. He had even expected a thunderclap to sound in the background, for emphasis.

We must excuse him.

No, we really must excuse him. Instead of reporting the danger of keeping unleashed werewolves about the school, the Wall had focused on Ten Ways to Trip a Poltergeist, Billy Hogarth's alleged crush on Moaning Myrtle, an amusingly-shaped balustrade in the Astronomy Tower, McGonagall's toenails (and the medicinal uses thereof), and a retrospective of Israeli cinema.

"Israeli cinema? _You _report _every_ _time _a First Year gets his _pumpkin juice spiked_ as if it were the end of civilisation; I almost got _killed_ --"

Lovegood had been unperturbed.

"I have a certain fondness for Israeli cinema."

Snape, unlike his earlier self, took a breath — keenly aware of the careful calculations the other man was making — and forced himself to relax. "My apologies."

"Think nothing of it."

"Your question was vile."

"My apologies," said Lovegood deliberately. The wand remained pointed at Snape.

"And your daughter's question was vile, an incitement to violence even."

"From Luna? No."

"In certain circumstances," said Snape. "In certain company."

With a very subtle inclination of his head Lovegood conceded the point, then caused the wand to disappear. "House Slytherin does consider pedigree important."

"And House Ravenclaw considers primitivity fascinating," said Snape, again turning purple with vitriol. "Need I remind you that a number of people in her House and Year have parents with a record of experimenting on goblins?"

"She was only curious, you know. I'd been researching goblin customs -- how they've been influenced by contact with Wizarding society and vice versa --"

"No doubt," Snape said, his voice sharp as ice, "for an _article_ on how they drink the blood of innocent Wizardly babies."

There was a pause during which Lovegood did nothing more than keep his eyes turned in Snape's general direction: endless eyes, blue and endless as a midsummer day.

"I believe we've exhausted this digression. What has Luna done to make you throw sanity to the winds and actually come to see me?"

Snape summoned a modicum of calm and voiced his opinion that children, particularly stupid ones like Lovegood's, should not be privy to information about intelligence-gathering techniques, much less to an almost-built mechanism, and that it was dangerous to let her keep knowing what she knew, since lives were at stake, which was obviously not as important as the sighting of a Bibblinewt in Chipping Barnet, but given that Luna had absolutely no control over her impulse to _announce things -_-

"I can't, Severus," said Lovegood flatly. "I cannot, and wouldn't, and will not perform a memory charm on my daughter; you knew that."

He did know it, of course. Anything of the sort would probably confine the child to St. Mungo's for the rest of her life. The trouble with Luna was that her mind was a much more haphazard affair than that of most people. It wasn't that she was forgetful: far from it. She just filed things away differently, folded thoughts into the shape of their least relevant object, so that a night at the opera might take the form of a paper crane. _Obliviate_ wouldn't know where to look. Snape had once tried Legilimency on her: it had been like taking a swig from a butterbeer bottle only to find it full of motheaten lace. He'd been unable to get the taste out of his mouth for a week.

"Congratulations on raising a creature that is impervious to the skills of the Dark Lord," said Snape maliciously. "But the _goblin_ episode was symptomatic. If you'd taught her the question you might have taught her the answer, and _how_, and when and where, and _with whom_ to ask it, and when _not to_."

"I don't know the answer," said Lovegood, solemn as a child.

"Don't change the subject," said Snape. His fingers were twitching toward the hem of his sleeve. "At some inopportune moment she'll inform everyone within earshot that I keep a Tengu on life support in my laboratorium. Such comments have a way of being noticed and travelling far."

"And then being forgotten if their source is considered prone to believing absurdities. She's quite as likely to announce that Redbellied Wurstknockers have colonised Easter Island."

Snape felt a momentary vertigo. "Have they?"

"Maybe." A rather smudged telegram rose from the desk toward Snape. "One of my overseas sources swears to it. I was considering writing an article, though perhaps a feelie, or a film, would be a better medium--"

"Why do you fill her mind with this rubbish?"

Lovegood took a sip of his tea. "You're as bad as your master."

"I'm surprised you don't think I'm worse, given your propensity for gratuitous exaggeration."

"No, you misunderstand. He thinks himself above this rubbish too; you all do. He doesn't think about bread and entertainment - he doesn't even notice them."

"Bread and entertainment are luxuries," Snape observed drily, "when you're too busy taking over the world, and killing, and dying, and all those other things that don't involve butterflies."

"Exactly. He doesn't notice the pastimes of the _hoi_ _polloi_ except to laugh at them. A failure of imagination, of course, but one that works out very well for us."

Snape stared at him.

"Put your wand away, Severus; please."

He did so, wondering how Lovegood could have drawn first. "Do _not_ presume to instruct _me_ in the Dark Lord's imagination, Lovegood. His _imagination_ is--"

"Limited," said Lovegood. "He has never taken an interest in the _Quibbler_."

For a moment Snape thought Lovegood truly was mad. "You expect the Dark Lord to take out a subscription? Is it the cross-runes you think will amuse him or the gossip about singers addicted to hellebore?"

"Oh, do have a cup of tea," said Lovegood, ever placid. "I simply think that if one is going to take over the world one ought to pay attention to the things that make the world go round, like bread and entertainment. And tea. There's often more to them than meets the eye."

"I see. You believe the Dark Lord needs a pair of Bendy Lenses, detach along the perforated line, free with next Tuesday's issue at participating retailers only."

Lovegood disregarded this and beckoned at one of his bookshelves with the tip of his wand. "For instance, this —" a thick book tumbled out of a shelf, caught itself before hitting the floor, and flapped labouriously to the desk in puffs of dust — "is my copy of the treatise on mercury by Paracelsus. I believe you know it?"

There was a slight change in Snape's manner: an alertness, a bristling.

"I have had occasion to consult it in the past."

"So did my wife. I believe her copy is — yes, knocking at the door."

A similar volume staggered through the air and barely missed Snape before coming to an erratic halt in front of him. Snape kept his eyes narrowed upon Lovegood, who busied himself with another cup of tea.

"Perhaps you'd like to glance through them."

"I'm acquainted with the treatise on mercury," Snape demurred. "It's indispensible, though aimed more at a Muggle audience than at us. For all the good that it did Isaac Newton."

"As I'm sure you're aware, these two copies are identical in every respect but one. There is a spell, I believe…"

Snape considered the implications of this. His memory of the conversation would need to be re-knit anyway, but the dangerous moments in it were multiplying at an alarming rate: tugging on associations yet untouched, tangling threads that up until then he had managed to keep separate. On the other hand, these purposeless conversations had an odd life of their own.

"_Sic_. In every respect but the --"

No: Lovegood was not casting any charms. Nevertheless a disturbing suspicion had seized Snape's insides, which was -- even more disturbingly -- confirmed a moment later when the latest issue of the _Quibbler_ sidled up to him from the corner of Lovegood's desk.

"In every respect but the words," Lovegood supplied.

Again Snape wondered how he got himself into these discussions. ("I don't want to know," he protested, or might have protested, but Lovegood gave no indication of having heard.)

"Our main story this week is about Clavius Konigsberg, mysterious prince of Pythgania, and his rumoured affair with Juliette Françoise-Messaline Arlequine d'Ablis de la Roche-Robécourt. Interesting material: you might want to peruse it. The photograph is most flattering to Madame Françoise's legs."

And it was. Snape let his mind go blank for a moment, then contemplated Blaise Zabini's mother, who was laughing a silver laugh on the arm of a dark and transparently very rich man. Her dress robes were cut very tight, and a breeze — most likely designed by Messrs. Vorris & Vox for a substantial price tag — teased the slits of the robe along a lovely length of skin. The caption featured three exclamation points and an appreciative whistle.

He forced himself to read the article, struggling to Occlude this new information while doing so. It didn't work.

He then gave up and traced a fidgety pattern on it with his wand. It didn't work. After another try, and a quizzical look at Lovegood, and three other versions of the pattern -- which made the _Quibbler_ wiggle and giggle, claiming that it was ticklish -- he narrowed his eyes (Lovegood deflected the hex) and muttered "_Sic_," with a tap, to the page.

In an instant the photograph, legs and all, had melted and Snape was staring at a detailed wizarding map of the Malfoys' residence.

"Notice the date has changed?" said Lovegood, like a child who wanted a pat on the head. "It's a built-in Legilimency aid. We did, in fact, publish a much less detailed plan of this house on that date, in the _regular _part of the issue... the architecture digest, I believe."

This was a disaster: the _Quibbler_, evidently, was a broadsheet organ of the resistance. Snape hadn't known this. He didn't want to know it. It was almost painful thinking how much of his memory would now have to be repackaged, unassumingly, so that he did not know it the next time the Dark Lord turned his awful eyes into him.

"This is a disaster," he said aloud.

When he turned the page he further learned that the _Quibbler_'s "Lovestrike!" page was not, as he had previously supposed, a way for people of minimal intelligence to meet other people of minimal intelligence for moonlit walks on the beach. It was a way for people called "the Inquisitor" and "E" and "Shadayim" to meet whomever they were supposed to meet and exchange whatever goodies they were supposed to exchange: that very night (he learned) "Sword" would model for a certain figure-drawing class, and on Sunday next he learned that "Wormwood" would be selling old phonograph cylinders at a certain antiques fair in Wales; presumably their contacts would develop an itch for sketching nudes or scratchy songs from the Twenties. The only thing mitigating the dreadful nausea Snape felt was a vague smugness at how conspicuously these characters had named themselves. He'd been subtle. They were just begging to be branded as spies. They had not, as he had, outgrown the sort of impulse that drives a kid to label himself "the Half-Blood Prince."

At that time it would not have occurred to him that his contact in the Order had been married to Lovegood. It would also have not occurred to him to _Sic_ an issue of the _Quibbler_, for the equally simple reason that the _Quibbler_ was rubbish. A failure of imagination, as Lovegood had so helpfully said.

"Our circulation is higher now than it has ever been," Lovegood was saying, "and we even have a foothold in the international market."

"_Enough_."

"There is something to be said about hiding things in plain sight," he went on. "We don't even bother to code half of it. Nobody Serious reads the tabloids..."

They regarded each other for a time.

"So all this rubbish—"

"It's very democratic rubbish."

"I dislike democracy," said Snape with a sneer.

"Almost all of it is true, as it happens; though we make sure much of it is unverifiable — Redbellied Wurstknockers and such — so that it seems to be rubbish, if anyone who's too good for rubbish cares to look. And it's all delightful, don't you think? People find it delightful. Even when there's some doubt about whether something we print is strictly speaking true, people find it delightful to believe in delightful things."

There was no sarcasm in Lovegood's manner, no sign of a frown; no excitement, no tension; not even this fabled delight: just the clear expanse of forehead and the glasses and clear eyes and the wisps of whitening pale hair.

"Of course, delightful things might be completely beside the point, if the point is Freedom or World Domination or something Serious like that," he went on, "but I've found the best defense against Serious Things to be delight, really. Don't you think?"

"Spare me the philosophy."

The samovar abandoned its place in the corner and careened onto the desk between them, spilling tea, of which Snape finally accepted a cup, and steam, which momentarily fogged Lovegood's glasses.

"As to Luna, you've noticed she's impervious to the skills of the Dark Lord. The things she says are usually true, but so unimportant and so uninteresting to Serious People that they don't notice her at all. They think she's crazy. You yourself came to me the second you needed to communicate something important to her."

"I almost get the feeling," Snape muttered, "that you're using her as a sort of _experiment_."

"Not at all. I treat her as an equal, as I've been trying to explain to you. Nobody else does. Really, who do you envision believing her? The only recorded mention of your pet is from an opium-dazed traveller who devoted much of his manuscript to Monopods. A physical impossibility. Or hogwash, as Hermione Granger would say."

Evidently this failed to satisfy Snape, whose lips tightened into a forbidding line.

"Forgive me if I'm wrong, but bored housewives believe that Cornelius Fudge keeps no less than three veela mistresses. Hogwash, as Hermione Granger would say."

"Mm... you'd be surprised. Fudge is quite the -"

"Never mind that!" snapped Snape, exasperated. "I don't want a twelve-year-old imbecile with no concept of self-censorship anywhere near my laboratorium. Whether anyone _happens_ to believe her or _happens_ to remember what she says is _irrelevant_, because she _talks_, and she's a _liability_, and _all_ these _ridiculous contortions _-" he hurled the magazine at Lovegood - "are going to be _completely useless if she gives me away_. What do I have to do to make you understand that!"

Lovegood pointed out that twelve-year-old imbeciles were never anywhere near Snape's laboratorium until he gave them a detention, and that Luna would have had nothing to talk about if Snape had been more careful, and that he was not to refer to her as an imbecile, please. And Snape pointed out that he could refer to her as whatever he pleased, and that he would not have had to refer to her as an imbecile if she was not, in fact, an imbecile, which she might not have been if Lovegood had done a better job of raising her, which he might have done if he'd realised that the Dark Lord was _not_ a joke and _not_ a bit of sophistry but a very serious threat, and _even though_ Lovegood refused to believe that Serious Things were serious they _were_ serious anyway, and had to be taken seriously, and could that blasted magazine _shut up_?

"You hurt it," said Lovegood, calm as the Hogwarts lake, as he picked up the magazine from the floor where it was howling. "You shouldn't throw it like that; it has a weak spine."

"_Stop that_," whispered Snape. He wasn't sure what exactly he meant, though he knew he'd meant to say something very important before that digression on parenting. "That... legerdemind. Stop it."

"I'm not doing anything, Severus."

For his part Lovegood was pleased that Snape had forgotten to ask him how he'd come by the details of the case, but it was perfectly true that he wasn't doing anything.

"Well stop it anyway."

(He couldn't.) "I'm _not doing anything, _Severus; you give me too much credit." (He wasn't.) "You can't blame me for objecting to my daughter's being called an imbecile."

"Of course," sneered Snape, "it's far more important to focus on the spurious damage my vocabulary does to her, not the damage _her_ vocabulary can do to _me_ -- to all of us. There's very little standing in the Dark Lord's way --"

"You give yourself too much credit," Lovegood said placidly. "We're all doing our bit, you know."

"All of which," Snape returned to his earlier point, wondering _why_ the man was so frustratingly obtuse, like Luna or a student,as to make him repeat himself, "will be absolutely irrelevant if she gives me away. _All_ the bits we do. All of us."

"And if she does?"

There was a dense silence, during which certain negotiations took place, establishing that yes, Lovegood was serious, and that no, wands would not be drawn.

"I really think you're overreacting."

"Am I?"

"Well -- you didn't tell her what were doing. You didn't explain how the thing works. Even if she tells someone you keep a dissected Tengu stashed about your rooms, and even if someone believes her, and _even if_ someone understands what that means, and _even if_ word gets around --"

"You can't be serious," said Snape, for whom the very thought of word getting around -- any word, around anywhere - was a source of near-panic.

"You know better than anyone that it's not the gadgetry that creates good intelligence."

"No, Lovegood. No. It's bloody hard enough to keep them all off me without drawing _yet more_ attention to what I keep stashed about my rooms!"

"It's bloody easier than you think. I regularly publish my own techniques in this - as I believe you put it - this _rag_, but nobody has stopped eating asparagus purely on my account. It's quite remarkable what people will believe - or won't believe, if you nudge them just right. You'll think of something. In any case."

Snape wasn't sure he'd ever allow himself to think again.

"Asparagus?"

"A healthy vegetable," said Lovegood. "The editorial board diligently promotes its consumption."

"Right." (At this rate he'd have to amputate half his mind by dinnertime.) "So, in the end, I'm to do nothing about Luna except hope that nobody thinks to notice her. Brilliant."

"Were you hoping I'd pull her out of school?"

"I was hoping the good fortunes of the resistance would bank on something more solid than _hope_, actually, though you've convinced me your strategy is failsafe. If only I'd known earlier just how easy it is to defeat the Dark Lord: do nothing and _hope_. Should I keep my fingers crossed while I'm at it?"

"Squeezing your thumbs works better, I find," said Lovegood, quite seriously.

"The better to make my hands useless."

Lovegood shrugged. "As you wish. You know, I think you're only here for reassurance, which I believe I've provided, amply. Now you'll have to excuse me--

He stood up, a small man whose robes hung on him like on a hanger. "Something in the Department of Conspiracies requires my somewhat urgent attention. Do make yourself comfortable, though."

Snape took him at his word and silently began checking the wards on every possible entrance to the office, including the Muggle wiring. He then scanned the room for recording devices, spyholes, addlers, scavengers, and anything that would bite him. He satisfied himself as to the lack of broadcasting charms. He was about to scan the room for the eighth time, in case the books' bindings were weak and images could leak out of them and tamper with his work, when Lovegood put a hand on his shoulder.

"Severus. It's safe here."

"Those photographs?" said Snape, his eyes feeling peeled with exhaustion. Luna, aged around five, was bouncing up and down on what appeared to be a very large mushroom spewing clouds of many colours, which her mother was turning into butterflies from the very edge of the frame.

"They're self-explanatory and they speak only to me," Lovegood replied, "and we both have work to do. I'll take care of the rag. My daughter will take care of herself." He waved a flask onto the desk from an obscure shelf and filled Snape's empty teacup with a dose of the potion. "You'll take care of this. I think hope is perfectly justified by so much precaution, nu?"

The potion was a noxious shade of yellow. Snape grimaced: an old friend.

"There's a Pensieve over in the cupboard; tweezers are in the drawer; bottles, cutting boards, pencils — feel free to look around."

"I will feel _totally_ free to look around," Snape assured him. "With or without your consent. Didn't some conspiracy require your _urgent_ attention?"

"Are you dismissing me from my own office? You _are_," said Lovegood, trying not to smile. "How peculiar, then, that the door seems rather disinclined to let me out."

And the door, indeed, was fused shut with several new wards. Lovegood might have been able to give it the requisite passwords himself --though he wasn't, of course, _doing_ anything - but it was simply a matter of etiquette. Snape muttered at it, convinced it to open, silently changed the passwords again - he was so invested in all this, bless him. Yes, it was only polite to play along.

"Remarkable. I don't think I've ever seen half of those. You know, if you ever find yourself out of work you can always head our Security Team."

Snape gave him a look of utter loathing.

"Just a thought. Good luck, then --

"Enjoy your urgent conspiracy."

"I'm sure I will. It's an odd one, actually --one of my interns seems to believe I'll publish some sort of blood libel about goblins. I don't know where he got the idea."

"Don't you?"

"He's new, of course, but it's best to nip these tendencies in the bud."

"Is it?"

Lovegood stepped through the door with an noncommital wave, leaving Snape, smiling bitterly, to raise the wand to his temple alone.


	7. chapter seven

Hrm. If that previous chapter was excessively long, here's another (unfinished) Snape- Herr Lovegood interaction. Hooray for excessive, pervasive, gratuitous and all-encompassing Sue-age!

* * *

"You're going to write me an article," said Snape, skipping any pretense at politeness.

"Concerning what? Would you -"

"_No_. _No tea_," Snape pre-empted Lovegood's signal at the samovar in the corner. "The last time I drank your tea, Lovegood, I hallucinated for days. I found myself reminiscing about Griddleskiffs even though I've never seen one in my life. I discovered my fascination with the little-known life-forms at the bottom of Lake Michigan, of all places. I suppose I should have known better than to drink anything prepared _here_ -"

"Those creatures at the bottom of Lake Michigan are staple ingredients of Joe Reg's Red Eye Elixir," Lovegood reminded him. "The Dark Lord would surely understand if he caught you fantasising about potions that make sleep unnecessary."

Nobody had ever seen Simon Lovegood asleep, including his wife. It was not, of course, because he didn't sleep - he just preferred to be awake when anyone else was.

"Do you realise how difficult it is to properly Occlude two hours' worth of your chitchat _without_ a gratuitous yellow submarine popping into my mind every minute? Do you realise how _dangerous_ it would have been if I'd slipped up? Do you realise _I had to Occlude the bloody tea_? Do you know how _hard _it is to Occlude _tea_!"

"I find that random images are essential components of natural-looking thought," said Lovegood mildly.

"Yes, you fool; I find that too. I was constructing them. Your helpful interference unravelled everything I'd plotted in."

"Would you like to borrow _Randomancy: The Arithmancy of Randomness_?" said Lovegood in the same tone of voice he used to offer tea, as a paperback printed on dubious East-European parchment made its way round the room in what might have been a random trajectory if the walls hadn't kept intervening. "It's almost impossible to plot truly random things."

"Consequently you thought it expedient to hook me up to the random generator that is your mind."

"I thought..." As steam was beginning to seep in tendrils out of Snape's ears he adopted a more conciliatory tone. "Not meaning to cast aspersions on your skills, Severus, but I was worried the Dark Lord might be getting suspicious about you. There's nothing like a bit of silliness to convince him you're just a regular person. Controllable. Non-threatening. You know."

"Nothing like a bit of _silliness_ to convince _him_ that _I'm_ a _regular person_?" Snape fired back.

"Well... Your mind is very... it's too good to be true. That's all. I took the liberty of looking into your tea-leaves -"

Potions of sympathy were dangerous, if singularly useful: dangerous because they were easy to detect, and useful because they provided - for a short time - a free and unfettered link between the minds of the imbibers, by which information might be transferred even at great distance. If one were a fairly good Occlumens as well, it was possible to dip into the mind of the other party and have a look around, or slip in a thought that the other person would never have had, or rearrange things - as in an attic - with more subtlety than the average Memory Charm. The trouble was that their effects were usually recognisable and hard to pass off as side-effects of another potion, since potions of sympathy mixed poorly with anything else in the typical wizard's liquor cabinet. Snape had never used one on a Death Eater. They were best for communicating with one's own agents in an emergency - though again, in Snape's case, circumstances had rendered them somewhat redundant.

"There's no need to lie," Snape warned him, violence bleeding into his voice. "I know perfectly well how the 'tea' worked. I applaud you - or should I say, your wife - for contriving to make it taste _just like tea_. My skills pale beside hers."

"She never really cared if her skills were recognised and credited," replied Lovegood. "Could you please put your wand down?"

Snape was shaking.

"I think not. I think we'll continue this lovely discussion on my terms this time. You've already had your fun."

For once he had been quicker than Lovegood, an advantage he was loath to waste. A moment later the thought, unbidden, sprang to his mind that he was proving Lovegood's point: wanting to make him recognise and credit his reflexes once, just this once; dispel that hidden smugness - for obviously there was smugness under that perfect mask, there _had _to be - and somehow, as he was dismissing this very odd thought, his aim wavered (just a bit) and he was once again staring at the perfectly steady wand Lovegood had pointed at him.

Of course.

"Reverse Legilimency. Very nice. Was that _Suggestibilis_ or _Persuasio_?"

"_Diversio_, actually," said Lovegood. And a mangled TS Eliot had chirped "_His powers of obfuscation would make a fakir stare_!" before Snape blocked the charm, his wand now completely off-target.

"You forget, Severus, I have to sell my attempts to manufacture public opinion. Reverse Legilimency is my job. _Persuasio_ is a bit too obvious and _Suggestibilis_ too comprehensive, don't you think? _Diversio_ is neat. Distilled from veela songs, you know."

"Ah," said Snape, who really had no choice at that point but to put his wand away. Lovegood did the same, without the faintest hint of triumph, and Snape once again found himself marvelling at just how much he abhorred the man.

"Much better. As I was saying, your mind is a little too good to be true."

"Believe it or not, _Lovegood_, the Dark Lord expects my mind to look like Severus Snape's mind. Not like your mind. Not like your daughter's mind. Like _my_ mind. Precise, nasty, unsilly, and very much on-topic. And utterly devoid of butterflies."

"Like the recipe for a potion," said Lovegood, then proceeded to inquire after a certain riddle that the Dark Lord had reportedly given his Death Eaters after the Triwizard disaster, and Snape proceeded to dismantle his qualms point by point. It had been amusing, that riddle, particularly once it became clear to them all that Baby Crouch had been involved all along and that Kakaroff was halfway to Mongolia by the time of that meeting. It had been amusing to watch Crabbe and Goyle tiptoe around him, the one who had left the Dark Lord forever, tiptoeing with all their bulk: they'd been excited, as if they'd never had an idea before.

"The Dark Lord loves to set us against each other. His sense of humour is a bit... odd."

"If you're sure that's what it was," said Lovegood, sure that it was something different. "If you've taken all the necessary -"

"Do not presume to lecture me about _precautions_."

"Memory charms break, Severus; and they usually have very little in the way of information under them. You've got -"

Reflexes. Snape waited for Lovegood to get back up and replace himself in his chair (and his glasses on his nose) before speaking. The silence was thick and cold. To prolong it Snape waited until Lovegood had folded his hands.

"Dumbledore regularly puts me under Cruciatus to make sure nothing breaks."

A pale eyebrow moved incrementally upward.

"Are you surprised? So am I. Every time. Just to keep it authentic. And to the Falsitaserum regimen I've added a daily antidote to your tea. _Do not presume to lecture me about precautions_."

"All right," said Lovegood. The sallow skin and yellowed teeth were more than explained; and Lovegood did not want to imagine what was happening to Snape's insides. It was a wonder the man was sitting upright. "All right. I just thought I'd mention it."

And seeing that Snape was unmoved he hastened to add, "I'm sorry, Severus. Tell me how I can help."

Snape considered digressing on _help_: Lovegood had amply demonstrated, several times, that his _help_ was always the best of good-faith help - and so inappropriate under the circumstances as to be counterproductive. On the other hand, this time he was asking. And Snape was asking him.

"Horcruxes," Snape announced.


	8. chapter eight

Chapter re-posted. Still not the right intro, and it veers _even further_ off-course, but at least it has some references to Luna and the dissection bits will eventually tie back into the _Quibbler_. I know one isn't supposed to post until one is done, but I'm never done, so here's some more of un-doneness.

Suggestions solicited, as ever. Pay particularly close attention to Snape, who toes (and crosses?) the line between IC and OOC far more often than I'd like.

* * *

The Armour Potion was one of Snape's more clever inventions. He had been lying on his bed one particularly miserable night, chasing a moth with his wand and singeing its wings (until it couldn't fly anymore and fluttered, light as a feather, onto the pillow beside him) when the basic principle had chanced to enter his mind. Motionless he'd stared at the ceiling for close to an hour. Then the moth had chanced to graze his cheek in a pathetic twitch at flight and he'd turned his wand on it, slowly, to knit it a new pair of wings. 

"Very good, Severus," Slughorn had said in his bemused way when Snape, after a month's worth of near-starvation in the library, had presented him with his two lists. One was a fairly simple inventory of curses, jinxes, hexes, and their counterspells. The other - barely legible, and on a separate parchment - was a list of potions, their recipes folded under their names. When placed side by side they'd fit like cogs in clockwork.

"You're quite right, my boy; one can indeed translate spells into potions and vice versa. Some spells and some potions, that is; by far not all."

Yes, all; Snape had thought. It's just a matter of intuition. And which means are the best for a given end... after all, it's hard to draw a potion in a duel.

"Could you take a look at my conversion tables, Professor? I couldn't get enough data on thippleweed and balsa root and some of the others."

A sheet of parchment had emerged from one of Snape's textbooks: this one had had the approximate dimensions of a large tablecloth but had been liberally sprinkled with pinching charms which hid the non-essential information and reduced the chart to the size of a napkin. Slughorn had perused it with interest, flicking various columns to the foreground and dismissing them with a nudge of his wand. Occasionally he'd had to use a magnifying charm: Snape's cramped handwriting had been condensed into about a third of its normal size; at various points he'd added so much detail that the chart had threatened to sprawl into more than three dimensions.

"Yes, very thorough. Though I must say, Severus, I think you're putting too much effort into these formulae. One can't really _quantify_ magic, you know. It's just a matter of intuition."

"I need your help here, Professor," Snape had smirked. "It's obvious that the cocklegrass and the thippleweed must correspond to the twist in the wand here; but if, say, I needed to put that same twist in a potion that had _these_ ingredients -" (another bit of parchment was produced from Snape's pocket) "- wouldn't the Pincerkrill eyebrows counteract the effect of the thippleweed? Would it still work?"

Slughorn had laughed.

"Just try it," he'd said with an expansive wave of his hand, "and see if it feels right. Maybe Miss Evans could help you - potionmaking is as natural to her as breathing, I think; quite extraordinary." And he'd dismissed Snape with a pat on the shoulder, chuckling: "Bottling the entire _Standard Library of Spells_. What a project."

This had not been Snape's project at all. He had simply realised that it was possible to tamper with spells - and invent new ones - by converting them into potions and back again. He'd been in his fourth year at the time.

It had been a good idea in theory. In practice, however, the two Unforgivables (_Avada Kedavra_ being too easy to achieve by hand and thus of no interest to him) had proved singularly hard to bottle. And he had covertly provoked an opinion out of Lily Evans that had helped him not at all.

They'd been in class, Slughorn beaming like a very large sun over Evans (while a number of smaller suns like Potter orbited her nearby) as she waited for her ecru-coloured potion to go white. She'd chosen to make the Potion of Doubt: Slughorn had been a fan of, as he put it, nurturing the creative instinct, and Evans had been reading Nietzsche.

Snape had discovered, with the mental equivalent of a dry smirk, that he had _accidentally_ chosen a potion that required a pinch of powdered orangutan bone-marrow to be added in its last twelve minutes, and that he had _accidentally_ forgotten to supply himself with said ingredient before starting the potion. He hadn't, in other words, planned the trip to the store-cupboard that took him past Lily's cauldron. He also hadn't been surprised that his mind had arranged things this way, even with no conscious input from him.

It would have been unforgivable of him not to take advantage of the opportunity to talk to her.

"Your potion is utterly pointless, Evans - just cast _Existentio_ and save yourself the stirring."

"Shut up, Snivelly; you'll drip into her cauldron and ruin it," somebody-- perhaps Black-- had opined.

"What are you on about, Snape?" Evans had wanted to know. "_Existentio _is different. It has a different scope. It's more a… state of mind, rather than a pervasive doubt about facts. Isn't it?"

"Have you imbibed the thing already?" Snape had sleeked in reply. "The difference would be eliminated if you slipped in a hair or a nail-clipping from the victim."

There had been some unwitty witticisms from Potter and Pettigrew, concerning victimhood and Snivelly's hair.

"No," Evans had said, blushing a bit. "No, I'm sure you can't. You can't equate a generalised charm and a person-specific potion, Snape. They might have the same accidents but they're very different in kind."

She'd had a point, one which Snape had let Slughorn had praise at some length instead of trying to answer. Intuition could only do so much.

The solution had occurred to him that night as the shadows had swirled on his ceiling: might it not be the case (he reasoned) that a curse could condense on its countercurse, like breath condensed on a mirror? If, say, he made a potion out of _Protego_...

Another month had passed in the library, during which Snape's skin had turned into the dry brittle parchment of his research books and his inkwell had become as greasy as his hair. His Head of House had watched him with the same morbid delight he felt while crushing flobberworms. When Snape had finally ironed out the discrepancies in his recipe he'd found Slughorn waiting for him and positively grinning with anticipation.

"It's been terribly unfair for you to keep me in such suspense, my boy," Slughorn had clucked. "My health isn't what it used to be; it's beastly, _beastly_, to trifle with it."

"Very sorry, Sir," Snape had said, wishing Slughorn would just read the recipe.

"You've missed a number of _excellent_ evenings with the Sluggies - I almost started to think you'd turned your back on us. And though you're very clever, Severus, it's hardly in your best interests to pass up such a great opportunity. I thought an examplary Slytherin like yourself would be more -"

After Snape had given his promises to be more dutiful in his extracurriculars, and consumed a very small sip of the waddlecider Slughorn had pressed on him, they'd finally gotten round to the point.

"Ah... what have we here? Yellow bile, dragon blood - quite obvious, of course... thippleweed, yes, lignum vitae - my, you really have been paying attention to your herbaria - Laetoli ash, how clever..." He'd suddenly frowned. "Are you quite sure about this, Severus?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Your potion requires _cocaine_."

"Yes, Sir."

"My dear boy - surely the Horntail blood will suffice!"

"It's not like an ordinary Courage Potion, Sir; it requires some bending of reality."

Slughorn had wiggled his eyebrows for a time, occasionally muttering "Well!"

"At first when I read the reports of this one Crusader I thought about using hashish, but I don't think it'll mix well with the thippleweed either. Nothing mixes well with thippleweed, Sir," Snape had tried to play the ingenue, poorly. "I know it's a Muggle thing, but protection as a _concept_ sometimes forces you to use whatever resources you can."

Fortunately Slughorn had been too pleased with the overall result to point out that Snape sounded like an insufferable Ravenclaw essay, not like an ingenue. He'd ordered the necessary ingredients and signed the necessary access forms, and several nights later Snape had ladled his bluish liquid into a jar with a particularly satisfied sneer.

It had been late when he'd gottento the Room of Requirement – the ersatz Bluebeard's Chamber that generations of scientifically-minded students had called their own – and painted a circle of his potion onto the wall. There was not much wall in that room that had not already been spattered with suspicious substances or used for calculations, which made him feel cramped, and nervous, and even more sure he would fail when he stood back several feet and softly whispered "_Crucio_."

Nothing happened.

"_Crucio_."

Nothing happened. There'd followed a moment of panic where he'd wondered how well the potion would work if it dried. Then he'd pointed his wand at the wall again.

"_Crucio_."

Nothing happened. (How does one torture a wall, anyway?)

After several more tries he'd been shaking in a cold fury. It had taken him ages to brew the damned thing and earned him more snark, most of which had gone unanswered, to provoke him enough to _Crucio_ the entire school; but _this wall_ hadn't seemed to be getting the message.

He'd kicked an overturned flask. It had been lying there at least since the fifteenth century, so it had been rather grateful for being moved several feet to the left. It had been vocally grateful. It had infuriated Snape.

"_Crucio_!"

The flask had clanked, but – irony supreme – it had not been coated with the requisite potion. The dried bubbles of vitriol on its outside had hissed a little, however, before leaving Snape to the silence in the room and the growing suspicion that he was, in the end, useless at this.

"_Crucio_!" he'd hollered again, this time at the wall.

Still nothing. No: the Dark Curses were a coy and multilayered thing - what presumption it was to try to pin them down.

He'd glared balefully at his wand. (Indulging in teenage angst, are we? Too drunk on self-pity to concentrate on the task at hand? Those potions are rotting your teeth, pretty boy, for all the good they do you...)

For an instant he'd recalled Lily Evans looking at him with contempt of such finality he'd had to shut his eyes.

When he'd opened them, still reeling from the pain, the coat of potion had been peeling itself from the wall in fits and spasms. It had appeared to be oozing blood, or sweat, and when he'd raised his wand to catch it before it slid to the ground it gave a convulsive shudder. He could have sworn it had been whimpering.

"Lovely," he'd crooned in a hiss, lifting it as if his wand were a fork.

In a later encounter with the Dark Lord he'd been prepared to elaborate.

"Cruciatus, Master? Unforgivable. It's unforgivable to subject someone to complete, incapacitating, unbearable pain all at once, when much better results can be obtained by calibration."

"Get on with it, Snape. Get to the bloody point."

This had been one Moloch Gibbon, for whom patience was something played with cards. Malfoy, on the other hand, had been gazing at Snape with a vaguely metallic interest, which had sharpened at Snape's bow to Gibbon and become a half-smile when Gibbon had begun screaming.

"That was _Torquepollex_, Master," Snape had explained. And Malfoy's lips had twisted a bit more, as if in wonder that the Muggles had achieved something so neat.

"You dissected _Crucio_," Sinistra had said with a ghastly smile when he'd told her about it.

"Fourteen weapons are better than one," Snape had replied. "Even as a child I thought _Crucio_ was far too crude."

Sinistra was not the sort of person to waste her pity on such news. "That creates an ethical difficulty, doesn't it-- are the mini-_Crucios_ unforgivable too?"

"I didn't ask the Ministry," Snape had said, his voice dripping acid.

"I suppose that's why Dark Magic is dark," she'd mused, "rather than black-and-white."

It had been Crouch Jr. who'd found fault with Snape's approach. "But Master," he'd said, "what is the _point_ of this? We're wizards. We don't _need_ thumbscrews or knives to torture someone."

Snape had considered casting _Sectumsempra_ on him, just to point out that knives were useful in their way, but had kept his wand still. The Dark Lord enjoyed watching his gladiators practice; he also didn't think them competent enough to do so without spoiling themselves for the war.

Crouch had barely warmed up. "Why a thumbscrew curse, Master? When we need to question someone or break a Memory Charm we _want the information_ - we don't want to waste time. Really, Master, in my experience _Crucio_ simply can't be beaten. What is the point of these superfluous games?"

And Bellatrix Black, or Lestrange, or Malfoy, or whatever consanguinity she was up to these days, had seconded him. "I agree, Master. Pain is pain. Severus might like to play with his food," (Snape's eyes had narrowed) "but the results are much better without this _Muggle_ pussyfooting."

Not one for Dark or Grey or Sort-of-Twilighty Arts, Bellatrix. She'd liked clear distinctions.

"Now, now, Bellatrix," the Dark Lord had said-- in one of the rare moments when he sounded like Slughorn-- "I believe Severus was referring to the _Treatise on Torture_ of Paul Grilland, an excellent Dark Wizard in his time, even if he chose to practice his arts for the apparent benefit of the Muggle Inquisition. Fourteen weapons are better than one."

"The Inquisition?" Sinistra had shrugged. "I honestly don't understand where you find enough energy to invest in these things. Though I suppose I can't judge. We all have our pet blood-soaked historical period."

"We're living in one," Snape had tried -- to no avail.

"Of course we are. The most current event in world politics that I know about happened three thousand years ago, and I'm still quite on top of things. Someone was trying to take over the world. There was blood. Now someone is trying to take over the world and there's blood. Am I right? _Plus ca change_... I haven't missed very much, have I?"

Sinistra simply didn't care about Voldemort. "Will he create jobs for Astronomers?" she'd intoned once, when Snape had tried to press upon her the magnitude of the threat. "Will he offer a pension plan? Honestly, Snape, world domination is a pretty silly concept if you don't have a pension plan. And dental insurance."

She was an odd experience for Snape: not too stupid to understand, not caring just the same. "_Another_ Divination professor," she would say to him upon Firenze's appointment. "Did it occur to Dumbledore that I could teach them anything _he_ can? Anything he _and_ Trelawney can?"

"Dumbledore's hiring policies have nothing to do with qualifications," Snape would observe, feeling brutal. "Or with teaching the children. You know that; it's why he hired you."

"And you," Sinistra would say, not to be outdone.

"And Trelawney, and Hagrid, and Flitwick, and the werewolf, and the centaur, and Filch, and I have my suspicions about Sprout. In fact I'm hard-pressed to think of someone who works here who isn't incapacitated in some way, other than McGonagall."

Her sense of humour was dry but rarely deserted her. "Perhaps I could improve my prospects if I told him my mother was a sphinx. Incapacitating, no? Surely it benefits some affirmative action."

"You'd do better if your mother was a goblin."

She'd smile her tight wide smile. "How is Miss Lovegood treating you these days?"

"Impossibly." Snape would look sour. "Yesterday she felt compelled to interrupt class for a lecture on the endangered status of an ingredient. How's she treating you?"

"Yesterday she felt compelled to interrupt class for a lecture on how Galileo wasn't Inquisitioned because of his heliocentric system but because the Pope had a bad case of the runs. I do so love the child."

Snape would snort. "Enough to write for its ubiquitous _dad_?"

"Come on, Snape. I'm a charity case. Lovegood runs an even bigger charity menagerie than Dumbledore. And Hogwarts funding isn't what it used to be-- aren't _you_ feeling the pinch?"

Creature comforts didn't concern Sinistra, but the telescopes required maintenance. She also required certain books by Muggle authors, which had to be purchased with Muggle money; and with exchange rates being what they were, and with the bankers twitching and paranoid and barely willing to lend Muggle money at all, for fear of a crisis, and with the Muggle publishers charging what they did for good solid research-based books, she'd really have no choice. Simon Lovegood had odd priorities, but he also had had the foresight to make enough money to burn.

"Because he keeps getting sued," Snape would hiss. "With good reason."

"But he never loses," she'd reply wryly. "And Dumbledore's defense budget is spiralling out of control. Now, out of all the people who obsess about world domination, Dumbledore's probably my favourite. I can make _some_ sacrifices for him if I have to. On the other hand the Babylonians obsessed about world domination too, and caring for their astronomers was part of it, not something that could be put off until everything was all right again. But what does _he _do? He hires Firenze. Which means that the single job of Astronomer-Diviner that the Founders had in mind is now split into _three_. Which means we should each get a third of the set endowment. Which would have been enough - I don't need the fanciest of fancy clocks or anything - but we only get a third of what's left over when he's done withholding our security taxes. Even that might have been enough, but his defense budget is -"

"Spiralling out of control. You already said that."

"Well, what is he _doing _with it? He can't be bribing Voldemort!"

Snape would then tell her about the Wolfsbane Potion, and the prohibitive costs thereof, and how this was symptomatic of all of Dumbledore's other endeavours - which, inexplicably, boiled down to maintaining a retinue of people (or some approximation thereof) who never really did anything. Sinistra's yellowish eyes would widen in the dark. When he'd finished she would grin: "Please tell me you're siphoning off a respectable amount for yourself, at least."

"Only the most respectable of amounts," Snape would demur. "If it makes you feel any better, Black was eating rats for a while - though it might have just been his way of contributing to the cause." And he'd explain about Pettigrew.

"I'll bet Dumbledore was paying him to do it, then," Sinistra would laugh. "Maybe we could tell Dumbledore I've been bitten by a werewolf, so he could give you twice the money he does now. We could split it."

"You're not important enough to save," Snape would say, perhaps with a smile.

He'd gradually gotten used to her and her habits. She slept in a hammock. Her company was first tolerable, then pleasant, then mercifully distracting from the torpor of work; though it never became so distracting as to make him forget that Sinistra, more than anyone, was one of Dumbledore's approximate-people who _never really did anything_. It was galling. She had a mind. Lovegood, at the very least, had a world's history of people killing his people informing his every thought (and his wand-arm) to let this latest of Dark Lords rise unopposed. His ideas about opposition were a bit odd; but at least he had them. Sinistra had removed herself from the land of the living.

She'd been his first ally at Hogwarts: a tight-smiled, unconcerned ally who didn't expect him to be jocund or force him into the camaraderie of Hogwarts activities. She cared little for Hogwarts activities. Part of this, of course, was that she was exclusively nocturnal; and her work had sharpened her eyes to the point that even layers of shading-charms couldn't make her comfortable in the Great Hall. On the rare occasions when she appeared at the staff table it was for an emergency breakfast, at dinner, when her need for coffee eclipsed her aversion to light.

He'd quickly learned which professors were likely to engage him in conversation, and when; and Sinistra had kept to her own orbit so scrupulously that he'd written her off as a threat almost at once. So it had been a surprise to find her at his door late one night. She hadn't greeted him but announced, "I need something to smoke. Could you?..."

Snape had waited for more information and thought about slamming the door.

"Anything. Any old rubbish. Neither Pomfrey nor Sprout stock that type of thing. Students, you know. Underage. I'm literally ready to beg."

"Madame Rosmerta, I believe --"

"It's four in the morning."

And so it had been, but it hadn't been a concern of his. He'd told her so: "You'll just have to control yourself, then."

"What an auspicious start," she'd sighed. "All right, then, Professor Snape; I shan't trouble you any further. Good night, or good morning --"

"Good morning to you too," Snape had said, moving the door several inches closer to its frame.

"I'll be up until dawn," she'd said. "In the event that mercy or procrastination intervenes in my favour."

"Unlikely," Snape had said with a curt nod. "Good morning."

But his fingers had strayed, and he'd indulged them -- saying to himself that it was only for practice, only to make sure that he still knew what he'd discovered as a teenager of limited foresight, that he needed to do something with the pouch of peelings of minkwood (otherwise useless), that it would be a shame to throw them away, that only the tiniest pinch of ginger-root and the tiniest sliver of clove would be required to make them burn _really well_ and even clear one's sinuses when they did so. All in all it had taken him two and a half minutes.

Once he'd blended the shavings, however, he'd been at a complete loss as to what he might do with them. He'd been in no mood to smoke them. He could not very well have _delivered them to her_. And so he'd put them in the pouch and put it aside, along with his thoughts of Sinistra.

Precisely three minutes later Sinistra had tapped his door with her wand again. "Excellent," she'd said, spotting the tobacco-pouch at once. "Thank you."

She'd then shamelessly summoned it and traipsed off with no further comment.

When pressed about her timing -- Snape's paranoias were not to be trifled with, and nothing worried him more than someone spying on him in his quarters -- she'd grinned so cheerfully as to almost make him hex her. "It was something much more prosaic," she'd explained. "I just wandered back down here to pester you for a book. The _Theologia_ of St. John Damascene. The Library wards say that you have it, and that one Simplicius Delmonte -- in your own House, I believe -- had it before you. I'm marking essays, you see."

Snape hadn't believed a word of it.

"My perspectives on plagiarism are _historical_ rather than hysterical, you know, by which I mean downright lax; but this was just _so_ crude and _so_ blatant and _so _obvious it's insulting. His entire essay is copied word-for-word from the book. I wouldn't normally care so much, but does he think I don't read? Stupid boy."

"Why, then, did you grab the tobacco and _leave_?"

She'd stared at him. "My dear Professor Snape, I can't stand the light in your rooms, I can't very well smoke in the hallway... and, like I said, I'm _desperate_."

But after a full minute of Legilimency there had been nothing more forthcoming; nothing more than Sixth-Year essays and Simplicius Delmonte's plagiarism and the pipe and the pipe and the pipe. "Are you quite done?" she'd finally asked him. "Because the light is behind you. My eyes can't take much more of this and I'm useless without them, you know."

There had been something else in her mind, or about her in general, however, which Snape had found even more reassuring than her lack of hidden motives for tapping his door. It was a defensive, almost pathological disregard for everything on earth except her two long-haired Ravenclaw boys and her telescopes. And, of course, pipe-filler.

"Forgive me," Snape had said. "I was rude."

"Just give me the damned book; I'm getting _quite_ jittery. _Quite_."

He'd done so, and, curious, followed her to the Astronomy Tower. Along the way he'd asked her why she'd needed the book: would it not have been simpler to just line up Simplicius and _ask_ him, with the aid, perhaps, of a little Legilimency? She'd dismissed this with a twisted smile. "Mindgames? Life's too short. I'm rubbish at them anyway."

"The proper disciplinary action will be taken, I assure you."

"You know," she'd said to him, "you and I are the only professors at this school whose subjects are the exclusive province of Muggles. How disturbing is that?"

It had been dark in her quarters, and cold. It always was. Heat interfered with the telescopes. She didn't keep an open fire in her grate, didn't keep candles or light around even for marking essays. "How do you read?" Snape had asked. His own eyes preferred twilight, not this thick pitch-black darkness of hers.

"I'm rubbish at everything, really," she'd admitted. "The one thing I can do tolerably well are conversion-charms." And she'd waved her wand at the book and the suspicious essay, which had proceeded to read themselves, in unison, aloud.

"Leaves the hands and eyes free," she'd exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Students. Why should I devote all my attention to their drivel?"

The pipe had filled itself so quickly he hadn't noticed it starting to glow: perhaps a darkness charm had further been cast on the embers. By then Snape had started to rather enjoy himself. "Excellent policy," he'd remarked, "and the essay--"

"Oh, _awful_. Didn't even bother to write it in his own voice."

He'd listened to St. John Damascene drone in stereo for a few minutes more, then made his way back to his rooms.

* * *

Too Sue? 


	9. chapter nine

Teh obligatory dramatick A/N:

AmZ suggests that Lovegood is v. Sue, and that he would be less Sue, or at least _marginally_ less Sue, if there was a scene where the shit gets kicked out of him. Apparently the bit where Snape hexes him clean out of his chair a couple of chapters ago is not equivalent to the shit getting kicked out of him; not in AmZ's understanding of things.

"Lovegood _let_ him do that!" said AmZ. "That's not equivalent to the shit getting kicked out of him!"

"No," said I. "Lovegood did not let him do that. Snape just got pissed."

"You know… your Snape…" said AmZ.

"?" said I.

"He's the least Sue-y Snape I've ever read. I know this because I don't like him. He doesn't seem to be very bright. I'll have to think about why."

As I started to say, the bit where Snape hexes Lovegood clean out of his chair a couple of chapters ago is not equivalent to Lovegood getting the shit kicked out of him, so here's a scene at Hogwarts where the shit does get kicked out of him.

…when I told AmZ about it, there was much rolling of eyes.

"At Hogwarts? Before Snape arrives? Come on. Everyone's weak as a little kid. It means nothing if he gets the shit kicked out of him when he's _little_."

I suppose this means that there will have to be another chapter where the shit gets kicked out of Lovegood where he's not little, possibly by Snape, who can be bright for a change. Next thing I know AmZ will be complaining that there are _too many_ scenes where the shit gets kicked out of Lovegood, little or not, and that _Snape_ has gone totally Sue. There is just no pleasing some people. Tsk!

**Actually this is the sort of concrit I like, need, and will be your bitch for. Particularly if it comes with specific suggestions.**

And while AmZ is figuring out what's wrong with my Snape, check out her Les Miserables fanfic. There's much historical detail and an excellent Javert who can be appreciated even if you know squat about the fandom.

On to the out-of-place, unfinished, gratuitously silly chapter in which logic more than ever go boom.

* * *

At school Simon Lovegood's potionmaking skills had been, in a word, frightening. 

It wasn't that he didn't _get_ Potions. It wasn't that he didn't like Slughorn, or that he didn't do the readings. And he understood as well as his average classmate what was meant to happen in the cauldron. What was meant to happen in the cauldron, however, never happened.

"Erm, yes," was Slughorn's stock response to the flasks Simon brought him at the end of every lesson. "Erm, Mr. Lovegood – look, my boy – it's… well, it's... you've done it again."

Perhaps we've overstated our point. Simon Lovegood could brew beautiful potions. His version of the Red Eye Elixir, for instance, had been held up as an example to the class. His Everything Goes Draught had won him extra marks. His Fruit-Finder Quafflet had revealed some interesting secrets about his pet tortoise Havelock. But _most_ of his creations caused Slughorn to pull out his hair.

The boy had been tolerably intelligent and as hardworking as Hufflepuffs usually were, always polite, and unabashed in asking for help. Everything he did to his ingredients was correct. He stirred the proper number of stirs. He set the heat to the correct hotness and chilled his spoon to the correct chill. He waited the proper number of minutes. He never forgot to lick the spoon before dipping it in, like most of the students, when this move was required. Yet he always had the same problem. Slughorn just couldn't understand it.

Lovegood was incapable of producing a potion that was not orange.

The Cud-Chewing Potion was green. Lovegood's attempt had been orange.

The Pickpimple Potion was the approximate colour of pus. Lovegood's attempt had been orange.

The Corpse-Suture Balm was supposed to be a nasty shade of brown with purplish foam and some maggots floating on top. Lovegood's maggots had been so dismayed at finding themselves in an orange potion that they'd leapt from the cauldron and expired, orange, on the floor.

"Erm, yes," Slughorn would grimace. "Perhaps some more cat-whiskers. Or chestnuts. Or a banana…"

Lovegood would dutifully comply. Nothing helped.

There was only so much orange a body could take, and Slughorn had stopped finding it funny after the first week. "Perhaps it's the cauldron?" he'd tried. (It had not been the cauldron.) "Or the fire? The spoon?"

It had not been the fire or the spoon.

"How are you doing this, boy!" he'd once lost control and hollered at Simon. "It is impossible for every potion you brew to be orange. Stop playing these games – Potions is a required subject for almost every respectable job! You can't master _only_ orange ones – it's like knowing only the comma!"

On most days Lovegood had Potions he'd also have orange hair (or eyes, or robes, or underpants, or teeth). His classmates didn't even think it amusing to hex him orange anymore; it had become a matter of routine. After Slughorn's outburst, however, which had occurred during double Potions with Slytherin, Lucius Malfoy had been inspired enough to erase all the writing from all of Lovegood's books, essays and notes, reducing them to the blankest of blank parchments except for the occasional comma. It had taken three days for the charm to wear off.

Dora's opinion had been that commas were terribly bourgeois. "Because there's nothing more kitschy than several pauses per sentence, don't you think?" Lovegood, of course, hadn't even thought about thinking about it, so she'd succeeded in talking him out of using commas altogether --except when absolutely totally inquisitionably roll-over-deadly necessary. This had been a mouthful, and it had rhymed, and it had made the effects of Malfoy's curse all the more devastating.

McGonagall had been unamused. "I know that the comma is not the only part of our writing system familiar to you, Lovegood. What _is_ this you're giving me?"

His essay had been a highly speculative bit of drivel in which he'd fantasised about Transfiguring things (like himself) into empty space. Or it would have been -- he'd explained -- except that Malfoy's intervention had caused most of it to become invisible.

"Malfoy ate your essay and spit out the commas? I'd have expected a better excuse."

"But Professor --"

"You're to write your essay for tomorrow. There will have to be a penalty, of course. And in future we'll have none of these games."

"They're not games, Professor," Lovegood had mumbled, blushing scarlet. This was also becoming routine. Like the hexes. And like his potions, which liked to be orange.

Their effectiveness turned out to fit a simple Arithmantic function of the difference in wavelength between orange and the colour of the target potion. Given that the class had received a syllabus with a time-schedule from Slughorn at the beginning of the year, Lovegood had been able to calculate his final grade for the class after an afternoon in the library. His prospects had been grim.

"That one's green," Dora had been eager to help him.

"This sort of green?"

She pointed. "Like that."

They had, between them, managed to conjure a spectrum with the exact wavelength of any colour appearing at the touch of a wand. It had taken them several hours, but it worked pretty well -- provided one didn't care too much about purple.

"Oh. I was hoping it was more like _that_."

"No, no… or maybe I'm forgetting," she amended. "But I'm pretty sure it was less orange than _that_."

"It must be you," Slughorn had finally said to him. The boy had seemed very small behind Slughorn's endless trophy-covered desk, especially with the monstrous chair he was in. "For the life of me I can't think of anything else it could be – the headmaster is convinced you're quite honest. But there must be something wrong with…"

Lovegood's potions were as orange as his eyes were blue. This had been disconcerting.

"Don't take it, erm… well, don't feel _bad_, my boy; I've seen students with all sorts of problems when it comes to potionmaking," Slughorn had carried on in as jovial a tone as he could muster. "They try, of course. But not everyone is adeq – erm, has the right touch; far from it. What can you do? Quite a rare thing, actually, when someone has the touch; comes along once in a generation, if that. No, you're certainly not to feel bad, my boy. Several years ago there was Innocent Benedict, for instance. He always made _solid_ potions. And Maggie Silverstein's ones always end up kosher and totally useless…" He'd faltered. "Not that… I mean, it's not that I have anything against kosher as a philosophy, you understand; it's just _difficult_… well, there's just not that many potions you can make without some sort of blood!"

"Or reptiles, Professor," Lovegood had supplied evenly. "I understand. It's not your fault."

"That's just the trouble!" Slughorn had wrung his hands and changed the subject with some relief. "You _do_ understand! At least, I think you do. Your essays are, well, quite respectable efforts. You _understand_ how to make these potions – what are you doing wrong?"

"It must be _me_, Professor," Lovegood had parroted, even and helpful as ever. "They must be allergic to me."

Dora had made all the potions before and occasionally wrote Simon's essays; but even she'd had to shrug in sympathy whenever he brought up his little problem. "Maybe you're making them kosher too, like Mags, only a bit more passive-aggressively? Subconsciously? Without noticing?"

"No. Her potions aren't all orange."

"You can tell me, you know. Is it some sort of political statement?"

He'd shaken his head in frustration. "I don't know. I'm honestly trying to get them right. They just want to be orange. Do potions even _have_ politics?"

The resulting conversation had been productive in all sorts of ways except the relevant one. "I guess it really must be you, then," it had concluded. "Unless the Slytherins…"

"It can't be the Slytherins. They don't have class with us every time. My potions are _always_ orange, Dora. Always."

"So what are you going to do?" Dora had asked.

"Can't you think of anything else it could be?"

Though she'd tried – frequently, often, and at great length – she had been unable to explain the consistent orangeness of his potions for the rest of her life. It was Simon's problem and his alone; peculiar to some aspect of himself that remained unexplainable. This was why Slughorn had sent him to counselling.

* * *

I'll add more to this chapter when more is written. There will be a statue. It will be of a urinating faun. 

Notice how he didn't get the shit kicked out of him yet? And of course AmZ (and others?) might point out that it's even more Sue to give him a gratuitous "flaw" that he can't control or do anything about. On the other hand, when I cook it somehow _always_ turns into scrambled eggs. Always. Even if I was aiming for pepperjack spinach lasagna. (Don't we all love writing Sues?)

I promise, I promise he'll get the shit properly kicked out of him one of these days.


	10. chapter ten

Oh, la. Another non-sequitur! If you're all sick of hearing about Lovegood, do leave a review saying so. I'm an incorrigible Suethor, but I can be persuaded to refrain from posting (at the very least). In the works are a completely unnecessary chapter about owl-post and its shortcomings, a rewrite of chapter seven in which Lovegood gets his ass kicked, and a whole lot about Luna. I promise, and I promise to deliver -- which in practical terms means fuck-all, really.

Is anyone annoyed by the way this fic somehow got swallowed by dialogue? Me too. It was all very promising at the beginning. Perhaps I should take it down for a while, until the talkie-bits can properly be interspersed with irrelevant essays on Ravenclaw run-ins with the Wizarding criminal justice system or something.

Anyhow, this is an OotP-timeframe encounter between Snape and Lovegood: chock-full of pepperjack cheese, current events, the pepperjack-cheese version of current events, and a bit of pepperjack violence. The Sue bloats evermore. Lance the Sue! Lance it! Leave incisive concrit, please.

* * *

"Twelve cartoons of the Dark Lord," Snape said in a deceptively pleasant voice by way of greeting. 

"Guilty as charged!" Lovegood replied. "One of the kids down in the Suspicious Circumstances bureau is writing a children's book called "There's a Dark Lord In My Closet!" and couldn't persuade any of the illustrators to contribute any pictures of, erm, the current one. Apparently everyone was scared that either a Ministry minion or a masked Death Eater -- or, in some versions, Lord Voldemort himself -- would nip over to their beds in the dead of night and kill them very slowly. This is a state of affairs which, I think you'll agree, cannot continue."

Snape was making a show of perusing page three of the French edition of the _Quibbler_.

"The Dark-Lord-as-angel attempts to fly away from Death but can't, having already given Death his wings, brain, halo, and all his squishy bits."

"The book will be a hit when it comes out, I'm sure," said Lovegood mildly. "It's written in really catchy verse. The first page goes 'Dark Lords here, Dark Lords there, In my closet -- Everywhere!' I think that's very sweet. The kids will love it -- Luna completely approves."

"The Dark Lord is about to rape Death, who screams 'No, no, you've got the wrong gal; I'm the Ministry of Magic'?"

"Dark Lords here... Dark Lords there..." Lovegood was chanting with an infantile smile.

"The Dark Lord is mysteriously pregnant with a bomb?"

"Actually, Luna's thinking of writing a foreword. Something about Salad-oil Salamanders. She claims -- and I believe her -- that they have a very powerful Dark Lord threatening them in the guise of deforestration. Quite a neat bit of reasoning for a fourteen-year-old imbecile."

"The Dark Lord is five years old and sitting on Santa's knee, only Santa appears to be Dumbledore in a poorly-drawn costume. Santa says, 'Now, Tommy, I _want_ to give you the world, but nobody believes you've been bad enough this year.' So much for taking care of the rag."

Lovegood shook the magazine off his face. "Much could be achieved if the Wizarding World could be persuaded to yell 'Riddikulus!' in unison in your master's general direction."

"Oh yes, there is indeed one of the Dark Lord as a boggart! Brilliant, Lovegood, and useful in the extreme. Do you know that the occasional stray Death Eater in France has _seen_ these cartoons? That the Dark Lord is not especially pleased?"

"Yes," said Lovegood, "I do."

"Let me impart a really important secret to you. The Dark Lord does not laugh at cartoons. He sneers a bit, and then says _Avada Kedavra_."

"Perhaps he really is a boggart, then," said Lovegood insolently. "We clearly need more people laughing at him. Perhaps a few more cartoons will do the trick -- make him incapable of casting nasty curses, that sort of thing."

"And this will be achieved _how_?" hissed Snape in exasperation. "He actually exists -- you published that barely-coherent interview with Potter. He's dangerous. He can actually do things like rape Death and steal the world out of Dumbledore's pocket. He _has_ killed and he _will_ kill and he _likes_ killing, and his supporters --"

"-- have threatened to kill me and Luna and all my staff and anyone caught with a copy of the _Quibbler_. I know -- I got a letter to that effect, copied to Cornelius Fudge himself. And I received... oh, two hundred and seventeen death threats at last count this morning."

"Congratulations."

"Yes, well, most of them seem to have been written by Bellatrix Black -- or whatever consanguinity she's up to these days. What is she now, Lestrange? She always thought she could vary her handwriting. Silly girl. But pretty enough to get away with most theatrics, I find. Don't you agree?"

"You're getting people killed," Snape stated. "Already. In France there have been three murders _already_. Three. Since yesterday. Does that register?"

The clear blue eyes, unperturbed, continued staring through Snape. "Gruesome business. I'm told they had a copy of page three fused onto their faces -- death by suffocation. Clever, I have to say. Much better than _Avada Kedavra_. It's good to know your master's French subsidiary has more imagination than our lot. _And yes_, Snape, I know you can curse me into tomorrow: I still find it clever, and tragic, and amusing, and I see no contradiction in any of that."

There was a long pause.

"I don't see you wandering about the streets of Paris," Snape said bitterly. "I don't see you asking Bellatrix over for tea. You're here; it's your beloved _readers_ that have to die for your clever bloody idea. Your clever bloody _wrong_ idea which will get more people killed -- why, exactly, do you have to go about everything the wrong way?"

"So you can fix things," declared Lovegood. "You like fixing things, don't you? My wife always said you were brilliant at it."

"Come off it. There's no way to fix dead things," said Snape. "Yelling 'Riddikulus' in the Dark Lord's general direction --"

"Blast it, Snape, he isn't Lord of anything yet!"

They glared at each other, motionless.

"Just Bellatrix and some lunatics in France, right?" Snape said conversationally.

"One lunatic. One. The operative words here are 'lunatic' and 'one'. He isn't even a Death Eater -- he's a Beauxbatons dropout Death Eater wannabe. Of course _you _already knew that. We've christened him Nibbler -- rhymes with quibbler, appropriately enough."

"I'm sure you've passed on this information to the French Ministry, so as not to be guilty of criminal nondisclosure under Statute CXIX in the European Thaumical Union's Constitution."

For the following several minutes Snape fingered his wand, scrutinised the ceiling, watched an errant spider fixing the part of its web attached to Marsilio Ficino's _De Vita Libri Tres_. As Lovegood's inappropriate spasm of mirth showed no sign of letting up anytime soon Snape lightly flicked an counterdrunkenness charm at him. He then had to wait for tears to be wiped and stray giggles to subside, and for glasses to be wiped clean of the teardroplets that had spattered them, and for several calming breaths to be taken, and for a brief relapse, and then for Lovegood to beg out of the hexes Snape was obliged to cast, and for the last vestiges of laughter to be wrung out of Lovegood by a somewhat painful spell used to juice carrots in Ancient Egypt. Presently sanity re-established itself in the room, although -- Snape couldn't help noticing -- it had slightly tittered edges. "You were saying?"

"I'm sorry, Severus, but it was _funn-- _erm, right; hard as it is to be less competent than our Ministry, the French have achieved it. They've a warrant out for _my_ arrest, for instigating hatred and rebellion, and incitement of violence against the adherents of a registered religion, under Paragraph 22 of the Separation of Churches, States, and Magical Worlds Act of 1955. Le Grignoteur apparently had enough foresight to register the nameless one as a god. Now tell me, could He have achieved that himself?-- or is bureaucracy even more powerful than your master?"

"Mm," purred Snape, "I don't know. But I can just see your bug-eyed little brat with these pictures glued to her. The suffocation aspect of things will probably make her more bug-eyed, of course, but at least it'll no longer be visible. Quite an improvement; almost one devoutly to be wished. Yes, I can just picture it..."

"Don't say another word," Lovegood warned him, all traces of merriment gone.

"I wonder -- will the next luna-tic be so kind as to kill her directly or will he play with her a bit first? I think he'll play with her. Maybe more than a bit. Maybe at some length, actually -- some of the Death Eaters have bizarre but not altogether unusual tastes, inclined toward the barely-pubescent blonde variety of Lolita --"

Snape had managed to keep talking through the curse that sliced his cheeks open, first the right and then the left, Lovegood threading his wand through the air with the sort of precision that only Potions Masters are thought to have, and managed to keep his voice steady as each gash (on the right and the left, on the right and the left, at equal intervals on the right and the left) unstitched the lengths of his arms, and refrained from screaming -- though his voice was now ragged -- as Lovegood moved to his insteps and calculated his way up his legs, precisely, retracing the same infinity-sign into nerve after nerve. The pain only choked him when he could feel the spell hovering over his groin and his jugular.

"Your priorities are... wrong," he hissed, though not, this time, for effect.

"You're staining my carpet," Lovegood replied coldly.

"Your priorities... were always... wrong--"

"And you're staining my carpet."

Little neon fireflies had begun peppering Snape's field of vision. He forced himself to count them, wondered what trick of oxygen-deprivation and pain had made Lovegood's eyes appear orange, tried to spin against the spin. _I didn't scream yet_, he thought, and then, somewhat incoherently, _I didn't tell him anything about Rosebud_.

Just as the blackness began closing over him he thought he saw Dumbledore stepping out of the washbasin, as cheerful as if he were taking a walk in the park.

"Ah, Simon, Severus -- having a nice friendly chat again, I see."

Neither of them felt the slightest inclination to answer.

"I think you've made the point you were making, Severus," Dumbledore said after some time. Snape glared at Lovegood. Most of the wounds had been reknit and a numbing extract administered, though he was distinctly displeased at the fact that Dumbledore was holding his head up. "As noble as it is to warn an ally of the clear and present danger he's in, however, I'm disinclined to let you die for it. In fact, I expressly forbid it. NEWTs are coming up, after all; you'll have to mark your share of the exams coming in from abroad."

Snape glared at Lovegood.

"I'm told there's a miraculously bounteous crop of Potions students in Botswana this year, and with the French having changed their system -- well, obviously, the school boards are at a bit of a loss for options. Tongue-tying Toffee?"

"I'll pass on the caramelised punch-line, Headmaster, thanks," Snape glared at Lovegood.

"I find them extremely useful when I find my mouth and my mind have become disengaged one from the other," the headmaster went on. "Though of course such a thing rarely happens to one with as quick a mind as mine. You, my dear, have been warned."

Snape glared at Lovegood a bit more balefully for emphasis.

"No. I'd slice you to pieces."

"Whatever happened to freedom of speech?" remarked Snape with a sneer.

"_You've made your point_, Severus. I would have expected more self-control from both of you. _Both_ of you."

"You expected what you got. And _as _it's unwise to leave your vulture's froth and scum pooling about, one or the other of you is going to get that mess out of my carpet. Negotiate it between you," Lovegood said flatly. "I'm not going to apologise, Albus; he's not worth another word."

"A thousandth of a picture," Snape pretended to muse. "Good to know the exchange rate for lives in your ledgers."

"_Enough_, the pair of you! My patience isn't infinite and this isn't a theatre class. I'll only say this one more time: I can't have the Order destroying itself; the other side is quite capable of doing it for us. Regardless of whether _you_ choose to believe it. And now --"

"-- see to the carpet," Lovegood finished the sentence for him.

We sadly have to abandon our friends at this poetic juncture, though the reader may rest assured that glares were glared and snarks were snarked for some time afterwards, and that Lovegood stubbornly refused to be civil for the remainder of the afternoon. His parting words to Dumbledore were, quite frankly, unprintable.

* * *

Oh, the Sue. Did I forget to mention that there's another pepperjack chapter in the works where the Sue drags Snape to Chicago? This is getting out of control. 

...and that's your cue for concrit. Everthanks.


End file.
